Anatomy of an Attack: Gaining Remote Access Using Valid Credentials

With the increasing proliferation of the remote workforce, most organizations provide the ability for remote access into their networks, either via VPN, Citrix, or other access mechanisms. External remote services allow users to connect to internal network resources from external locations. Remote service gateways often manage connections and credential authentication for these services.

Adversaries who have obtained valid account credentials may leverage external remote services as a point of initial access into your network and a mechanism for establishing persistence. Attacks from external remote services are difficult to detect given the use of valid credentials to obtain initial access.

This gives the appearance of legitimate authentication to the services, therefore discovering the malicious activity before damage is done involves threat hunting expertise and advanced machine learning capabilities. Suspicious Remote Access can be leveraged in every stage of the “Cyber Kill Chain”, AKA attack path so vigilance in detecting adversary presence is key.

Read this threat dissection for more information on the challenges of suspicious remote access incidents and see how eSentire’s proprietary machine learning tools & MDR for Log work together to detect them.