Imagine walking into your workplace. You have a badge that you swipe to unlock the door, and as you’re entering, someone behind you calls to you, asking to hold the door for them. You don’t recognize them but you’re polite, so you hold the door and unintentionally let in someone who is planning to rob your workplace. Now imagine that this scenario is happening online, and you don’t even know someone is sneaking in behind you. This is an example of session hijacking — an unauthorized person who takes advantage of legitimate sessions to cause harm. How can you prevent this from happening at your organization?
How Flare Helps Combat Session Hijacking
How can Flare help your team with session hijacking prevention?
Threat actors hijack sessions with the help of infostealer malware which quietly infects your devices, stealing sensitive information. That information is used to generate stealer logs, files with records of the data captured from the infected system, including cookies, logins, fingerprints and other information.
The Flare Account and Session Takeover (ASTP) solution is designed to help large consumer SaaS web applications prevent the takeover of customer accounts.
Session cookies have become a prized target for attackers because they allow complete authentication bypass, including overcoming multi-factor authentication. Using stealer logs alongside tools like VPNs and anti-detect browsers, attackers can easily perform session takeovers. A stolen session cookie grants continuous access to the compromised account as long as the session is valid, even if the account owner employs strong security defenses.
Flare ASTP combats these risks with an extensive dataset of leaked credentials and session cookies, offering organizations seamless API access to utilize this data. This allows them to promptly revoke active sessions, counteract fraud, and enhance security measures. By focusing on the exploitation of stolen session cookies, Flare ASTP provides a critical safeguard against account takeovers, which are now a favored method for cybercriminals.
How does Flare mitigate damage after a session hijacking attack?
During a session hijacking attack, criminals steal information, such as passwords, email addresses, usernames, and personal details. These can all be used for identity theft or for other attacks down the line. Flare’s solution proactively scans the web to find sensitive information that may have been stolen during an undetected attack. Once that information shows up in an unauthorized location, the platform sends a notification to your team. You can then take action quickly to prevent further attacks and mitigate damage.
What do you get with Flare’s threat intelligence solution?
- Unmatched data collection: Flare uses billions of data points to provide your team with information about your organization’s security stance, relevant threats, and the movement of threat actors between platforms.
- Transparency: Flare lists every source so you can tell decision makers exactly where your threat intelligence data is coming from.
- Automated continuous monitoring: Using an automated solution gives your team 24/7 coverage, so you will know as soon as users’ information is compromised.
- A proactive security stance: By actively seeking out potential threats, you can catch breaches early, giving leadership and your team an opportunity to take steps to protect their data, systems, and networks.
Session Hijacking Prevention: An Overview
What is session hijacking?
A cyberattack in which an attacker takes control of a user’s active session with a service or application without their knowledge or authorization. This sort of an attack allows the attacker to impersonate the legitimate user and access their sensitive data, accounts, or services. Session hijacking isn’t new — in the old days it looked more like a Man in the Middle (MitM) attack, or a compromised or malicious site or application. Now, however, attackers steal session passwords, cookies and tokens using infostealers or phishing toolkits.
What are different types of session hijacking?
There are two varieties of session hijacking:
- Passive hijacking: Passive hijacking is like spying. In a passive hijacking attack, threat actors monitor the traffic between their prospective victim’s computer and a server. The goal is to collect and steal data.
- Active hijacking: Active hijacking means the criminals are actively working to crash an authenticated session. They can then take action by pretending to be the victim. This can mean stealing data or taking part in further attacks.
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How can session hijacking be prevented?
One of the biggest issues in countering session hijacking is that infostealers are often invisible, and many users simply don’t know about them. It may be difficult to tell if an attack has even occurred. Threat intelligence is an important tool in making your organization aware of the various infostealers that are being used, and of finding sensitive information that has been stolen and included in a stealer file.
Why is it so Important to Prevent Session Hijacking in Today’s Cybersecurity Landscape?
Why is session hijacking prevention important right now?
Session hijacking has gained in popularity among attackers as a way to combat multi factor authentication (MFA). Session hijacking provides a way to bypass MFA controls by harvesting session cookies. If an attacker steals an active session token after MFA authentication, the bad actor can bypass the MFA requirement, as the session is already authenticated, and hijack the session.
Where do threat actors buy stealer logs?
Stealer logs are repositories of information that threat actors are eager to buy and sell to one another. They are often sold in prominent threat actor communities and dark web forums and markets. Threat actors profit off of or build up their reputation by distributing these stealer logs.
How can you mitigate the risks of session hijacking?
Organizations can detect and prevent session hijacking attacks and attempt by implementing these measures:
- Password managers: When passwords are stored in a manager, not a browser, risk can be mitigated.
- MFA: Multi-factor authentication adds another layer of security to your devices.
- Employee training: Employees are the first layer of defense against external risks, and training is an important step in improving your organization’s defenses.
- Personal device policies: Strict policies on employees accessing corporate resources from their personal devices would greatly help with avoiding infostealer malware.
- Threat intelligence: Continuous monitoring for stealer logs and other stolen information across the clear, deep, and dark web is a critical part of finding leaks and fixing vulnerabilities.
Preventing Session Hijacking with Flare
The Flare Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution empowers organizations to proactively detect, prioritize, and mitigate the types of exposures commonly exploited by threat actors. Our platform automatically scans the clear & dark web and prominent threat actor communities 24/7 to discover unknown events, prioritize risks, and deliver actionable intelligence you can use instantly to improve security.
