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Canary in the Coal Mine: Detecting Account Takeover Before Your Digital Canary Dies

Rob Long

Updated: 6 days ago

The old practice of a canary in a coal mine served as an early warning system, detecting harmful gases before they claimed lives. Similarly, active web monitoring can be a digital canary, alerting businesses to potential threats before they escalate into full-blown account takeovers.

Credential stuffing, a common cyberattack, leverages stolen credentials to gain unauthorized access to accounts. It's akin to a thief trying multiple keys on a set of doors. If successful, attackers can wreak havoc, from stealing sensitive data to fraudulent transactions. - David Montague, CEO MyNetWatchman

Common fraud prevention tools, such as bot detection or IP blocking, are essential first lines of defense, allowing you to “blunt” an attack. However, they can lead to a false sense of security because it can be difficult to tell when an attack occurred, unless you are watching, and they won’t tell you what accounts were targeted or successfully compromised.

An active web monitoring service is a crucial second line of defense, alerting you to ongoing attacks and compromised accounts. For example, we recently saw a company attacked, where millions of accounts were targeted for account takeover and over 1500 were successfully compromised. The attack occurred over the period of a week and while the company was able to stop the scaled credential stuffing attack, we could see from our data they weren’t aware of the 1500 accounts the bad actor compromised out of the 8 million attempts.


We have found that bot prevention and IP blocking security tools may reduce the size of most attacks, but they don’t really prevent all attack activity from an adversary; they can still hit you with smaller scale attacks and other forms of attacks. Active web monitoring service is like a digital canary, constantly testing the environment and sounding the alarm when a compromised identity is detected.


You may need active web monitoring if:

  • You rely on existing bot detection solutions: While your current tools may be effective, they might not be able to detect all types of attacks or on what accounts were compromised.

  • You're experiencing account takeovers: If you're still facing account takeover issues, web monitoring can help identify the root cause and implement additional safeguards.

  • You need to assess the effectiveness of your security measures: Web monitoring can provide valuable insights into the performance of your security tools and identify areas of weakness that you weren’t aware of.

With active web monitoring, you can proactively detect compromised PII, credential pairs, and mitigate these threats. Add it to enhance your security detection plan to cover:

  • Real-time Monitoring: Continuously monitor for suspicious activity, such as unusual login patterns or unauthorized access attempts.

  • Behavioral Analytics: Analyze user behavior to identify anomalies that may indicate a compromise.

  • Threat Intelligence: Stay informed about emerging threats and vulnerabilities to proactively protect your systems.

  • Prompt Response: Have a well-defined incident response plan to quickly address security breaches.

Active web monitoring is not a complex development effort, for most clients, it is minimum effort. In many scenarios there is no development and straightforward implementation - up and running in 24 hours or less.


When you really need to know, web monitoring tools provide the ease of mind in knowing you can see issues before your customers, or worse the press, tell you about them. By acting as a digital canary, active web monitoring tools can significantly reduce the number of surprises from accounts being taken over and protect your business from financial loss, reputational damage, and legal liabilities.



 

For more information and real-world cases using active web monitoring, click the links below.

MNW Case Study - Customer M - 10% of successful credentials were successful previously at other locations

Post - Anatomy of Email Compromise - myNetWatchman investigated the case of a Yahoo.com email account that was compromised and accessed by bad actors nearly each day over a 3-month period

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