Initial Access covers phishing, exploits, and stolen credentials used to enter systems; MFA, patching, and segmentation reduce the resulting foothold.
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Background for this topic.
Initial access is the attacker’s first successful entry into an organization’s systems, accounts, or network. In threat-model terms, it covers paths such as phishing, exploitation of internet-facing applications or devices, use of valid stolen credentials, and compromise of a supplier or trusted service. The objective is to obtain a foothold that can support later actions, including privilege escalation, internal movement, or data access; initial access does not necessarily mean the attacker has administrative control.
The main security concern is reducing the number and reliability of these entry paths. Priorities include promptly fixing vulnerabilities in externally exposed systems, enforcing phishing-resistant multifactor authentication for sensitive access, limiting exposed services and unnecessary privileges, and using email, endpoint, and authentication telemetry to detect suspicious entry. Security teams should preserve relevant logs and investigate unusual logins or newly created access promptly, because the time between initial compromise and follow-on activity may be short.
Using VPNs as an initial access vector is ironic, given that security is the very reason enterprises employ them in the first place.
A 31-year-old Russian national named Evgeniy Doroshenko has been indicted for wire and computer fraud in the United States for allegedly acting as an "initial access broker" from February 2019 to May 2024. [...]
Criminal and Nation-State Focus on Network Edge Devices Continues, Researchers WarnAttackers have been escalating their attempts to compromise poorly secured virtual private networks - including appliances set for password-only authentication - to gain remote, initial access to enterprise networks, Check Point Software Technologies warns.