{
    "title": "2023 Great eXpeltations report: top six findings",
    "url": "https://expel.com/blog/2023-great-expeltations-report-top-six-findings/",
    "date": "Jan 31, 2023",
    "contents": "Subscribe \u00d7 EXPEL BLOG 2023 Great eXpeltations report: top six findings Security operations \u00b7 2 MIN READ \u00b7 BEN BRIGIDA \u00b7 JAN 31, 2023 \u00b7 TAGS: MDR Bad news: 2022 was a big year in cybersecurity. Good news: We stopped a lot of attacks. Better news: We sure learned a lot, didn\u2019t we? We just released our Great eXpeltations annual report, which details the major trends we saw in the security operations center (SOC) last year\u2026and what you can do about them this year. You can grab your copy now , and here\u2019s a taste of what you\u2019ll find. Top findings from the Great eXpeltations report 1: Business email compromise (BEC) accounted for half of all incidents, and remains the top threat facing our customers. This finding is consistent with what we saw in 2021. Key numbers: Of the BEC attempts we identified: more than 99% were in Microsoft 365 (M365\u2014previously known as Office 365, or O365) and fewer than 1% occurred in Google Workspace. Fifty-three percent of all organizations experienced at least one BEC attempt, and one organization was targeted 104 times throughout the year. 2: Threat actors started moving away from authenticating via legacy protocols to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) in M365. Instead, the bad guys have adopted frameworks such as Evilginx2, facilitating adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing attacks to steal login credentials and session cookies for initial access and MFA bypass. FIDO2 (Fast ID Online 2) and certificate-based authentication stop AiTM attacks. However, many organizations don\u2019t use FIDO factors for MFA. 3: Threat actors targeted Workday to perpetrate payroll fraud. In July, our SOC team began seeing BEC attempts, across multiple customer environments, seeking illicit access to human capital management systems\u2014specifically, Workday. The goal of these attacks? Payroll and direct deposit fraud. Once hackers access Workday, they modify a compromised user\u2019s payroll settings to add their direct deposit information and redirecting the victim\u2019s paycheck into the attacker\u2019s account. (Which is just evil.) The lesson? Enforce MFA within Workday and implement approval workflows for changes to direct deposit information. 4: Eleven percent of incidents could have resulted in deployment of ransomware if we hadn\u2019t intervened. This represents a jump of seven percentage points over 2021. Microsoft has made it easier to block macros in files downloaded from the internet , so ransomware threat groups and their affiliates are abandoning use of visual basic for application (VBA) macros and Excel 4.0 macros to break into Windows-based environments. Instead, they\u2019re now using disk image (ISO), short-cut (LNK), and HTML application (HTA) files. Here are some stats we find interesting: Hackers used zipped JavaScript files to gain initial access in 44% of all ransomware incidents. ISO files were used to gain initial access in 12% of all ransomware incidents. This attack vector didn\u2019t make our list in 2021. Nine percent of all ransomware incidents started with an infected USB drive. 5: Six percent of business application compromise (BAC) attempts used push notification fatigue to satisfy MFA. Push notification fatigue occurs when attackers send repeated push notifications until the targeted employee \u201cauthorizes\u201d or \u201caccepts\u201d the request. This allows the attacker to satisfy MFA. (Hackers may or may not have learned this technique from their four year-olds at home.) 6: Credential harvesters represented 88% of malicious email submissions. Credential theft via phishing continues to grow with identity the main focus of today\u2019s attacks. The top subject lines in malicious emails that resulted in an employee click or compromise were, \u201cIncoming Voice Message,\u201d \u201cChecking in,\u201d and \u201cVoice Mail Call received for <user\u2019s email>.\u201d Our data shows that actionable, time-sensitive, and financially driven social engineering themes are most successful. The full report tells you more\u2014lots more\u2014 and provides insights and advice to help you defend against these threats. Give it a look and if you have questions drop us a line ."
}