A critical Active Directory vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472) has been making headlines for being the most notorious elevation of privilege bug because it can affect all computers and domain controllers in an organization. This high-risk vulnerability, dubbed Zerologon, gives threat actors easy, instant access to domain controllers without requiring any additional privileges. This attack does not even require a user to be authenticated; the user just needs to be connected to the internal network.

More organizations than ever before have shifted to a hybrid work culture to reduce the impact of COVID-19. This unprecedented change has not only given rise to new security challenges, but has also considerably increased the surface area available for an attack. A blend of personal and corporate endpoints in use, geographical spread of resources, and a sharp spike in the overall number of security threats have further complicated the already labor-intensive security landscape.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. Organizations on a global scale observe Cybersecurity Awareness Month to educate and instruct their employees on cybersecurity best practices. This week we highlight some cybersecurity trends that are shaping the industry today.

Cyberthreats have been coming at us from the left, right, and center. The number of cyberattacks is forever on the rise, and companies need to keep ramping up their security measures to protect themselves. It’s important that these measures cover every aspect of a network environment. To understand why monitoring your whole environment is so important, let’s take a look at what an attacker might do once they get inside your organization.

There was a time when cyberattacks on identity and authentication infrastructures [like Active Directory (AD)] were immensely challenging to perform. A lot of forethought had to be put into devising a plan for the careful execution of attacks, and advanced technical knowledge of domains and networks was a requisite. Over time, with the advent of open-source pen testing tools, the knowledge gap and the complexities involved to carry out a full-scale cyberattack have narrowed drastically.