Account hijacking in cloud services
Account hijacking happens when an account (either belonging to a human or a system/application/service account) is compromised and an unauthorized identity gains access to use resources and data on behalf of the (usually high-privileged) compromised account.
Some common methods of account hijacking are as follows:
- Phishing attacks against a system administrator’s account, allowing an attacker to gain access to databases with customer data
- Credential stuffing, where a privileged account fails to replace its credentials, the credentials are leaked by unauthorized parties, and they are used to breach the organization’s systems
- Brute-force attack, which is an attack that uses an automated script to guess admin passwords until a weak password (such as short, not complex, or even a commonly used password) is found and can be used by an attacker
- Social engineering, where an attacker manipulates an admin account to reveal...
