Privileged Attack Vectors: Building Effective Cyber-Defense Strategies to Protect Organizations

© Morey J. Haber and Brad Hibbert 2018

Morey J. Haber and Brad HibbertPrivileged Attack Vectorshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3048-0_3

3. Password Hacking

Morey J. Haber¹  and Brad Hibbert²

(1)

Heathrow, Florida, USA

(2)

Carp, Ontario, Canada

 

Hacking of a password by a threat actor can be done using several techniques. Once successful, this can obviously lead to administrator privileges if the account has been granted these rights in the first place. It’s yet another reason to limit the number of administrator accounts in an environment. If the account is an administrator, it lessen the barriers to lateral movement and further attempts to crack other passwords on other privileged accounts on the same or reachable systems. As a point of reference, ...