NCC Group on Thursday released a report in which it has described the techniques and tactics of the highly unpredictable Lapsus$ attacks, along with how Lapsus$ attacks are launched and what makes it such a unique group.
The group currently gave up its operation following the arrests of alleged members in March. The attacks launched by the group remain confusing in both their motives and their methods. The group is known for targeting world-famous companies including Microsoft, Nvidia, Okta, and Samsung.
According to the report, Lapsus$ used stolen authentication cookies, specifically ones used for SSO applications, to initially get access into targeted systems. With this, the threat actors also scraped Microsoft SharePoint sites used by target organizations to get credentials within technical documentation.
"Credential harvesting and privileged escalation are key components of the LAPSUS$ breaches we have seen, with the rapid escalation in privileges the LAPSUS$ group has been seen to elevate from a standard user account to an administrative user within a couple of days," the report said.
Following the report, it has been learned that a major goal of the group is to exploit corporate VPNs, capitalizing on their increased use of them over the last few years.
"Access to corporate VPNs is a primary focus for this group as it allows the threat actor to directly access key infrastructure which they require to complete their objectives. In our incident response cases, we saw the threat actor leveraging compromised employee email accounts to email helpdesk systems requesting access credentials or support to get access to the corporate VPN," the report further read.
The Group has grown in just a few months from launching a handful of sensitive attacks that were designed to steal and publish the source code of multiple top-tier technology companies.
Sometimes the group is referred to as a ransomware group in reports, however, Lapsus$ is also known for not deploying ransomware in extortion attempts.
