A breach occurred after employee work emails were exposed on external sites, mainly due to their use on insecure personal platforms. Attackers launched a password spraying attack against these accounts, compromising those with weak passwords. They then exploited a poorly secured domain administrator account and misconfigurations in the certificate infrastructure to impersonate the admin, gaining full system access. This allowed them to extract credentials and create new privileged accounts.
Root Issues: Weak password practices, poor privileged access management, and misconfigured Active Directory and certificate infrastructure.
Key Recommendations:
Strengthen access controls and monitor privileged accounts.
Enforce MFA across critical systems.
Conduct regular privilege audits.
Implement Active Directory tiering to isolate critical infrastructure.