Corporate account takeover is a type of fraud where thieves gain access to the inner workings of a business to make unauthorized transactions, including transferring funds from the company, adding fake employees to payroll, and stealing sensitive customer information that may not be recoverable. Criminals may launch highly targeted account takeover attacks against senior employees, executives, developers, and system administrators with privileged access to sensitive data and funds.
In order to fight against this brand of cybercrime, it’s critical for organizations to implement a strong executive cyber protection program. SpyCloud helps you protect executives from account takeover by monitoring the criminal underground for their credentials and PII, quickly alerting you when their passwords become available to attackers via a third-party breach.
While all employees are targets and bring risk to the organization, executives attract the most attention from savvy cybercriminals. They are well aware that executives and others with high levels of access hold the keys to potentially lucrative data and IP. Once they break into the system through these VIP accounts, they can steal and sell corporate data as well as extort money, drain accounts, and fraudulently represent corporate executives.
Even with common security methods and tools, many organizations are still at high risk for a breach. Executive cyber protection requires more than multi-factor authentication, password rotation, behavior and heuristic-based solutions, and dark web scanners, crawlers, and scrapers. While all of these methods can be effective at some level, they fail to actually prevent corporate account takeover, even when used in combination. The proof is in the fact that while all of these solutions have been in use for many years, the rate of corporate account takeover is only increasing. To protect your executives effectively, you need a more proactive defense.
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When busy executives reuse or recycle passwords across different accounts, they put themselves and your enterprise at risk. Criminals count on that behavior, testing predictable variations of credentials stolen in third-party data breaches to take over other accounts.
SpyCloud enables security teams to protect executives from account takeover proactively by alerting them when stolen credentials appear on the criminal underground. With SpyCloud, you stay on top of your executives’ breach exposures and reset compromised passwords quickly to head off criminal activity.
The key to preventing corporate account takeover is to identify stolen credentials as quickly as possible after a data breach, before criminals have time to use them. The only way to do that is to have access to a comprehensive, constantly updated, real-time database of breach data that security leaders can compare with their directory of employee accounts per domain. The sooner the breach data is discovered, the faster any compromised accounts can be protected.
SpyCloud maintains the largest database of recovered breach data in the industry, with over 93 billion recovered breach assets. SpyCloud researchers gain access to breach data early in the breach timeline through a combination of human intelligence and applied research.
Because of the valuable assets VIP employees often have access to, cybercriminals may exert substantial effort to infiltrate their accounts. Tactics can include manually testing variations of stolen passwords to avoid raising alarms, bypassing MFA via SIM-swapping or phone porting, and using one compromised account to gain access to others with tighter protections.
SpyCloud gives security teams an advantage by gaining access to breach data as soon as possible after a breach, often before criminals have cracked passwords within the data. SpyCloud also enables security teams to monitor VIPs’ corporate and personal credentials for breach exposures, protecting both personal and professional accounts that may put them at risk.
Sifting through potential account exposures and resetting affected user passwords takes time that most resource-constrained security teams don’t have to spare.
SpyCloud simplifies executive cyber protection by enabling security teams to detect and reset exposed passwords automatically. Using Active Directory Guardian, busy teams can run manual or scheduled scans to check Active Directory logins for weak or exposed passwords, enforce alignment with NIST password standards, and reset passwords that have been compromised.
Business email compromise (BEC) defrauds businesses of billions of dollars every year, typically through seemingly-legitimate emails that are anything but innocent. Highly-skilled cybercriminals armed with just enough employee personal data to be convincing can use compromised accounts to trick colleagues and customers into taking risky actions that lead to fraud and data loss.
SpyCloud discovers credential compromises that are a pre-cursor to BEC, alerting security and fraud teams so they can take swift action and reinforce executive cyber protection.
Our award-winning products enable you to proactively protect your users’ accounts and thwart online fraud.
SpyCloud automates employee ATO prevention to save enterprises time and effort with their executive cyber protection strategies.
Schedule automated scans of your Active Directory users trigger password resets for executives whose passwords have been exposed.
This CSO whitepaper provides a guide to the best practices for evaluating how well each approach works, including a checklist of topics to discuss with each vendor being evaluated.
SpyCloud has analyzed breach data tied to Fortune 1000 employee credentials to understand trends in password reuse and data exposure. See what it means for the organizations that work with them.
Our 2020 report shows that password reuse continues to be a serious problem, leaving enterprises and their customers vulnerable to account takeover.
Stop exposures from becoming account breaches.