One core responsibility of any IT team is to try to provide their business with maximum protection from any potential vulnerabilities that could compromise internet privacy.
Part of this involves maintaining strict control over who has access to company information and resources. Only authorized users should be allowed to have access to internal materials. In order to block intruders, access is restricted by means of security protocols.
In fact, ongoing threat intelligence allows for the type of proactive activity that can keep networks safe.
But what happens when these security systems are breached? Part of how hackers operate is that they try to find flaws in the security system, which they can exploit in order to break in.
These vulnerabilities become well-known within internet security communities, including among hackers. As a result, there is frequent coverage around ‘trending’ vulnerabilities.
What is Zerologon?
One vulnerability that has emerged as well-known is Zerologon. Within the Microsoft environment and authentication protocol, there is a particularly large opportunity for a breach that is known as, “Zerologon.”
This vulnerability is known as “Zerologon” because it effectively takes away the need for specific credentials. Per Zerologon, hackers can access all the usernames and passwords on the network that they breached.
With Zerologon, there is no need to have just one specific access point. Users have all the credentials they could possibly need simultaneously. The hackers can use all usernames and passwords in the network, and gain access to the privileges of anyone in the network.
This means that any email account within the organization’s Microsoft Office 365 team can become accessible to any individual user who breaches the vulnerability. This grants absolutely unbridled access to confidential internal information.
Cybercrime prevention experts have been carefully characterizing such breaches in order to understand how to avoid potential occurrences.
What Is being done about Zerologon now?
The vulnerability breach dubbed “Zerologon” has been flagged by security experts all the way through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the United States federal government.
At the end of 2020, CISA published a post on the ongoing threat associated with Zerologon. It goes into great depth explaining how bad actors can take advantage of this vulnerability to gain unfettered access to domain administrator credentials.
With these administrator credentials, the hackers can get access to the entire Active Directory. It only takes a couple of minutes for these hackers to penetrate the entire network and gain access to all the information contained inside.
Through this vulnerability, hackers have been able to target government networks from federal through local and even tribal levels.
Because this breach occurs within the Microsoft framework, Microsoft itself has released guidance on how to resolve such attacks and actually bolster security in order to prevent future attacks.
Staying up to date as this risk evolves can help block future attempted breaches. Ongoing implementation of the latest patches and fixes are key reasons why it’s important to update software regularly.