Security News
Marketplaces devoted to selling stolen consumer online accounts make financial fraud easy, where threat actors can buy accounts for as little as $1.50 to Amazon, Marriot Bonvoy rewards accounts, Dunkin, Instacart, and many other well-known retail stores. To better secure your online accounts, many companies offer a security feature called multi-factor authentication, which when configured, requires users to enter an additional form of verification before being allowed to log in to their account.
OAuth is an especially appealing target for criminals in cases where compromised accounts don't have strong authentication in place, and user permissions allow them to create or modify OAuth applications. Microsoft, in a threat intel report, details one cyber crime crew it tracks as Storm-1283 that used a compromised account to create an OAuth application and deploy VMs for crypto mining, while also racking up between $10,000 and $1.5 million in Azure compute fees.
MFA adds security to online accounts, but MFA lookalikes are a real threat to consumers and enterprises. Consumers have come to trust MFA, but attackers can now get in the middle and take over accounts.
Microsoft has quietly rolled out a new mechanism that shields users of its mobile Authenticator app from suspicious push notifications triggered by attackers. In early May, Microsoft added the number matching feature for Microsoft Authenticator push notifications to boost account security and stymie attackers relying on multi-factor authentication fatigue.
It mandates privileged admin accounts to complete MFA when accessing Microsoft admin portals such as Azure, Microsoft 365 admin center, and Exchange admin center. Admins can choose to opt out of the policy despite the warning, but Microsoft said in the future it will place an increasing number of MFA requirements on specific interactions regardless.
Microsoft has introduced a new protective feature in the Authenticator app to block notifications that appear suspicious based on specific checks performed during the account login stage. Microsoft Authenticator is an app that provides multi-factor authentication, password auto-fill, and password-less sign-in to Microsoft accounts.
As part of a broader initiative to strengthen security, Microsoft is rolling out Microsoft-managed Conditional Access policies in Entra ID to increase the use of multifactor authentication for enterprise accounts. Microsoft Entra Conditional Access policies are built with the current threat landscape in mind and with the objective to "Automatically protect tenants based on risk signals, licensing, and usage."
Microsoft will roll out Conditional Access policies requiring multifactor authentication from administrators when signing into Microsoft admin portals such as Microsoft Entra, Microsoft 365,...
Amazon will require all privileged AWS accounts to use multi-factor authentication for stronger protection against account hijacks leading to data breaches, starting in mid-2024.Amazon has been offering free MFA security keys for eligible AWS customers in the United States since 2021 and added more flexible MFA options on the platform in November 2022, allowing the registration of up to 8 MFA devices per account.
Amazon wants to make it more difficult for attackers to compromise Amazon Web Services root accounts, by requiring those account holders to enable multi-factor authentication. The root account holder is the first identity created when creating an AWS account and the most privileged user, as it has access to all AWS services and resources in the account.