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The MGM attackers claimed they used one of the easiest ways to breach/ransom a company, a method I use often in my hacking:
1. Look up who works at a org on LinkedIn
2. Call Help Desk (spoof phone number of person I’m impersonating)
3. Tell Help Desk I lost access to work account & help me get back in

While we wait for attack method confirmation, I’ll say that the attack method they claim worked for them does indeed work for me. Most orgs aren’t ready for phone based social engineering.

Most companies focus on email based threats in their technical tools and protocols — many are not yet equipped with the social engineering prevention protocols necessary to catch and stop a phone based attacker in the act. Teams need protocols to verify identity before taking action.

The 1st teams I go after when hacking are the folks who deal with requests from people constantly — IT, Help Desk, Customer Support, etc.
I often pretend to be an internal teammate to convince them to give me access, and I usually start with phone attacks bc they work fast.

Email phishing attacks can get caught in good spam filters and reported.
The soft spot for many teams are the folks who handle the phone call requests.
There’s a perfect storm: lack of verification protocols, easy spoofing, compensation tied to how fast they handle requests.

Questions to ask internally to see if your team is prepared to catch this attack:
- Do the folks who handle requests from team/customers use identity verification protocols?
- Do we rely on knowledge based authentication? DOB + caller ID matches ☎️ number in system, for example.
- Are our IT/Help Desk/Support teams compensated or promoted on the speed of saying yes to requests? Have we incentivized time for security protocols in Support?
- How do we verify identity first?

Remember, most folks at work want to do a good job and often times “good work” means “fast work”. We can’t expect every employee to be able to come up with their own identity verification protocols on the fly — it’s our job to provide the right human protocols to catch this fast.

We’ll need to wait to learn the details of the attack and get confirmation.
In the meantime, I can tell you I compromise orgs w/ the exact phone attack the attackers claim to use and many orgs don’t have phone call based identity protocols to catch it yet.

Update your phone based identity verification protocols to catch account takeover attempts!
You know your org best & there’s no one size fits all.
You can move from KBA (like DOB) to OTP on 2nd verified comm channel, call back to thwart spoof, service codes, pins, and much more.

After hacking & educating orgs on how they can catch me, the biggest task I spend my time on is updating verification protocols to spot me next time. It’s maddening to get caught on their new identity verification protocol on the next pentest but there’s also nothing I love more.
More details here: https://x.com/RachelTobac/status/1701801025940971792?s=20