Account Takeover Prevention
Monitor your email domains for exposure
Whenever a service is breached or exposes user credentials, there’s a chance your organization’s username and password combination could be among the leaked data. Ordinarily, there’s little chance to monitor leaked data across the various marketplaces, including the dark web.
With SolarWinds® Identity Monitor, you have a better chance of knowing early about such credential exposure.
Get notified about leaked credentials
Reset passwords before they can be misused
When you get notified about your monitored domains appearing in a data leak, you have a chance to prevent attackers from using legitimate credentials to enter your systems. Force a password reset for the affected accounts, and the leaked credentials will be useless in the hands of the attackers.
For best practice, educate your users about unique passwords and using a password manager. A data breach and credential exposure shows the threat is real—it’s not merely theoretical.
Get More on Account Takeover Prevention
What is account takeover?
Account takeover (ATO) is a form of identity theft where real credentials, exposed by a security breach, are used to gain access to corporate resources, accounts, and systems. Cybercriminals can use these attacks for fraud and stealing intellectual enterprise property, which they can sell on underground markets for other hackers to purchase.
The standard account takeover attack consists of four stages:
- Breach: A hacker finds network vulnerabilities, also known as attack vendors and exploits them to gain user access.
- Targeted attacks: After fully gathering a network’s data, the attacker identifies wealthy, powerful, or otherwise high-profile and privileged users. The hacker may treat these victims differently, targeting them with manual account takeover or extortion methods like blackmail.
- Data sale: The ATO hacker engages with trusted users to parse network data, transforming it into shareable formats. This turns precious enterprise information into commodities sold to less sophisticated hackers.
- Credential stuffing: One way resold stolen data is used is for credential stuffing, which involves entering the same credentials into multiple websites, applications, and other logins. Some ATO attackers know how to balance effective credential stuffing without setting off alarms or causing suspicious user activity.
How to prevent an account takeover
Preventing an attack involves two critical operations—protecting your passwords and monitoring for your credentials in data leaks.
When it comes to passwords, it’s best to have strong password hygiene and follow best practices to help minimize the chances of ATO attacks caused by poor password practices. For example, using multi-factor authentication whenever possible can make stealing account credentials more difficult. Also, not using passwords similar to previously compromised passwords and changing passwords often, not only when prompted, can help fortify password strength and improve account takeover fraud prevention.
Knowing when your credentials may be compromised can also help mitigate potential account takeover vulnerabilities caused by leaked data.
To truly protect your network from account takeover fraud, use an account takeover prevention solution. These tools prevent account takeover through security alerts, password management features, and autodetection tools for seeking out exposed credentials. Corporate account takeover services enable you to enact the correct account takeover prevention, discovery, and resolution techniques.
How does account takeover prevention work?
Account takeover prevention works by constantly monitoring user accounts, then cross-checking this information against a comprehensive database of current breaches. Account takeover prevention monitoring discovers where your credentials may be involved in breaches using the expertise of security specialists who collect this data from across the dark web.
How does account takeover prevention work in Identity Monitor?
SolarWinds Identity Monitor offers highly effective account takeover prevention through a partnership with SpyCloud to let you more easily and quickly discover data breaches across public and non-public sources to flag compromised credentials.
Identity Monitor leverages intelligence data collection methods alongside automatic alarms and notifications to help prevent ATO attacks and rapidly spot account exposures before enterprise data theft can occur.
Identity Monitor is also designed to help end-users make proactive decisions to minimize the possibility of a future attack. Identity Monitor more easily resets plaintext passwords and sets passwords following the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines for strong passwords, promoting security, and demonstrating compliance.
You can also use Identity Monitor to view past data breaches and see where monitored credentials show up to spot account takeover activity right away.
Identity Monitor is further designed to help proactively protect your network from successful account takeover attempts through several intuitive features. Along with credentials like usernames and passwords, Identity Monitor monitors email domains. Get automatic alerts whenever any credentials associated with a monitored domain or personal email address appear in data breaches. Take immediate action to help prevent credential stuffing and access to systems and data by hackers.
Related features and tools
Other SolarWinds solutions designed to help prevent data breaches:
- SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
- SolarWinds Patch Manager
- SolarWinds Access Rights Manager™ (ARM)
Related features:
What is account takeover?
Account takeover (ATO) is a form of identity theft where real credentials, exposed by a security breach, are used to gain access to corporate resources, accounts, and systems. Cybercriminals can use these attacks for fraud and stealing intellectual enterprise property, which they can sell on underground markets for other hackers to purchase.
The standard account takeover attack consists of four stages:
- Breach: A hacker finds network vulnerabilities, also known as attack vendors and exploits them to gain user access.
- Targeted attacks: After fully gathering a network’s data, the attacker identifies wealthy, powerful, or otherwise high-profile and privileged users. The hacker may treat these victims differently, targeting them with manual account takeover or extortion methods like blackmail.
- Data sale: The ATO hacker engages with trusted users to parse network data, transforming it into shareable formats. This turns precious enterprise information into commodities sold to less sophisticated hackers.
- Credential stuffing: One way resold stolen data is used is for credential stuffing, which involves entering the same credentials into multiple websites, applications, and other logins. Some ATO attackers know how to balance effective credential stuffing without setting off alarms or causing suspicious user activity.
Be proactive in preventing account takeover attacks
Identity Monitor
- Monitor your email domains as well as private emails of high-impact employees.
- Get notified if your credentials show up in a data leak.
- Take immediate action to protect yourself from successful account takeover attempts.
