Search: “credential dumping”

Credential Theft: How Attackers Steal & Use Stolen Credentials

Huntress explains how attackers steal credentials through phishing, AitM, infostealers, and dumping, then use them for lateral movement, BEC, and ransomware.

Huntress published an educational overview of credential theft, citing that roughly 70% of confirmed data breaches begin with stolen credentials. It details acquisition methods including phishing, adversary-in-the-middle attacks that capture MFA session tokens, infostealers (nearly a quarter of threats Huntress observed in 2025), Mimikatz-based credential dumping, credential stuffing, and password spraying. The piece then covers post-theft actions such as lateral movement, privilege escalation, account takeover, business email compromise, and ransomware, and closes with behavioral detection guidance and layered prevention strategies.

Huntress·Sep 10, 16:00 UTC · 6d agoResearch

When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

Analysis of 16.9 million SOC alerts finds AI-related alerts at 0.43%, growing 685% since February, with 94.1% noise and 0.02% real attacks.

A review of roughly 16.9 million SOC alerts found about 73,000 (0.43%) were AI-related, a share that grew 685% between February and June 2026. Of AI-related alerts, 94.1% were noise, 5.8% genuine risks, and 0.02% real attacks; 79.8% received benign verdicts, 81.7% were automatically suppressed, and only 5.4% reached a human analyst. The only confirmed attacks were phishing campaigns that weaponized AI brand names as lures, while developer coding agents spawning shells and reading credential stores routinely tripped detections written before AI agents existed.

The Hacker News·Sep 12, 10:24 UTC · 4d agoResearch1

Enterprise Defenses Recovered at the Edge and Collapsed Inside

Picus Labs' Blue Report 2026 finds perimeter prevention at 69% but post-compromise prevention just 37%, with reconnaissance blocked only 10% of the time.

Picus Labs' Blue Report 2026, based on 434,000+ simulated attacks across client production environments in H1 2026, found perimeter prevention effectiveness rose from 62% to 69% while the Post-Compromise Prevention Rate was only 37%. Quiet techniques fared worst: reconnaissance was blocked 10% of the time, registry-based credential access less than 1%, and the alert score stayed at 14% despite logging at a four-year high of 58%. IOC-based prevention fell to 50% from 71% in 2024, and Mimikatz's LSASS path was blocked about 94% while alternative credential-read paths went nearly undetected.

The Hacker News·Aug 12, 11:41 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Research

338 Million Attack Simulations Reveal The State Of Enterprise Defense

Picus Labs' Blue Report 2026, from 338 million attack simulations, finds defenses strong at the perimeter but blocking only 37% of post-compromise actions.

Picus Labs' fourth annual Blue Report analyzed over 338 million attack simulations from production environments in H1 2026. Average prevention effectiveness rose from 62% to 69%, but only 37% of attacker actions were blocked after compromise, with reconnaissance and credential theft largely missed. IOC-based malware download prevention fell to 50% from 71% in 2024, and Mimikatz credential dumping from LSASS memory was blocked 94% of the time versus 17% from other memory locations and 3% from registry.

Help Net Security·Aug 12, 00:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Research

Hackers Turn Windows Shadow Copies Into a Tool for Credential Theft and Ransomware

Attackers abuse Windows VSS shadow copies to delete recovery points before ransomware and to extract NTDS.dit/SAM credentials, demanding context-aware detection.

Threat actors are weaponizing the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for two purposes: destroying local recovery points via vssadmin.exe, wmic.exe, diskshadow.exe, wbadmin.exe, and bcdedit.exe before encryption, and accessing static copies of locked files such as NTDS.dit and SAM for credential theft. Ransomware families tied to shadow-copy removal include Akira, Black Basta, BlackCat, Conti, LockBit, Qilin, RansomHub, REvil, Ryuk, and WannaCry. Huntress's analysis of the Nightmare-Eclipse tool showed the BlueHammer technique chaining a Windows Defender timing issue with a VSS snapshot to dump the SAM database and decrypt NT hashes. Defenders should correlate VSS operations with parent process, hive access, and subsequent encryption activity, and maintain immutable off-host backups.

GBHackers·Sep 15, 05:51 UTC · 1d agoResearch in the wild1

Hackers Steal Active Directory Password Hashes Without Attacking Domain Controllers Directly

Attackers use the DCSync technique to impersonate domain controllers and harvest AD password hashes and Kerberos keys without directly compromising domain controllers, Trellix warns.

Per Trellix, threat actors increasingly abuse Active Directory replication via DCSync, using privileged credentials to invoke DRSGetNCChanges and retrieve NTLM password hashes and Kerberos key material without running code on domain controllers. Capturing the krbtgt account hash enables forging Golden Tickets for persistent, highly privileged domain access. Because malicious replication traffic mimics legitimate DRS/RPC activity, defenders should monitor Windows Security Event ID 4662, restrict replication permissions, and investigate replication requests from non-domain-controller systems.

GBHackers·Sep 10, 12:00 UTC · 6d agoResearch in the wild 2 sources2

How Attackers Abuse VSS, and How Huntress Detects It

Huntress details how attackers abuse Windows Volume Shadow Copies for ransomware recovery sabotage and NTDS.dit credential theft, plus detection logic.

Huntress explains that attackers abuse VSS in three ways: deleting shadow copies to inhibit recovery before ransomware detonation, creating shadow copies to extract the NTDS.dit Active Directory database for offline credential theft, and manipulating shadow copy configuration. Because backup agents and RMM tools routinely create and delete shadow copies, raw events are too noisy to alert on alone. Huntress detections instead correlate VSS activity with lateral movement and credential harvesting over a time window, such as an observed sequence of PsExec spawning SYSTEM shells on a domain controller, vssadmin create shadow, a blocked deletion attempt, and DNS reconnaissance against another host.

Huntress·Sep 14, 13:00 UTC · 2d agoResearch

How Chinese hackers got their hands on Microsoft's token signing key

Help Net Security·Apr 30, 08:53 UTC · Apr 30, 2024Research1