Threat Actor Leverages Compromised Account of Former Employee to Access State Government Organization

SUMMARY

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) conducted an incident response assessment of a state government organization’s network environment after documents containing host and user information, including metadata, were posted on a dark web brokerage site. Analysis confirmed that an unidentified threat actor compromised network administrator credentials through the account of a former employee—a technique commonly leveraged by threat actors—to successfully authenticate to an internal virtual private network (VPN) access point, further navigate the victim’s on-premises environment, and execute various lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) queries against a domain controller.[1] Analysis also focused on the victim’s Azure environment, which hosts sensitive systems and data, as well as the compromised on-premises environment. Analysis determined there were no indications the threat actor further compromised the organization by moving laterally from the on-premises environment to the Azure environment.

CISA and MS-ISAC are releasing this Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to provide network defenders with the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by the threat actor and methods to protect against similar exploitation of both unnecessary and privileged accounts.

Download the PDF version of this report:

TECHNICAL DETAILS

Note: This advisory uses the MITRE ATT&CK for Enterprise framework, version 14. See the MITRE ATT&CK Tactics and Techniques section for a table of the threat actor’s activity mapped to MITRE ATT&CK® tactics and techniques. For assistance

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