Summary

As established in the introduction, attackers want to use the path of least resistance to compromise your network. This usually means exploiting the same handful of tried and true tactics which rely on misconfigurations and bad security practices. Believe it or not, these common misconfigurations are not hard to repair.

Some of the most popular are:

• Exploiting an unpatched edge network appliance to gain remote code execution or stealing information such as usernames and passwords.
• Using stolen credentials to log directly into a network via a VPN or cloud service like AzureAD or Google Workspace.
• Many different types of phishing could lead to having credentials stolen or malicious code being executed on the victim’s computer.
• Brute forcing or guessing the username and password combinations to access a cloud or on-premise system.

This section will discuss how each of these attack methods works, which in turn should help you understand how to prevent and detect them.