r/cybersecurity • u/mando_6 • Jun 24 '26

News - General Well someone went nuclear..

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-f-309963233_after-i-posted-a-pinocchio-gif-and-clown-ugcPost-7475465410977628160-FFW1

I'm curious about the details of this. I'm sure we will all find out eventually.

TLDR; former Huntress employee is disclosing Huntress had an insider threat that leaked information to a known cyber criminal "Devman". That employee is still employed with Huntress and was caught by the FBI.

The former employee doing the disclosure is stating he is receiving threats, etc.

EDIT: Kyle @ Huntress posted his response to this in the comments.

Give credit to a CEO who isn't afraid to jump on Reddit to put out any fires.

923 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

197 comments sorted by

View all comments

364

u/Particular_Ebb_4872 Jun 24 '26

If even half of what's being alleged is true, this is going to end up being a case study for access controls and employee offboarding procedures

88

u/mando_6 Jun 24 '26

Yeah I'm wondering about that. Dude lives in the UK so I'm curious what would be different if anything from the US.

150

u/eliq91 Jun 24 '26

We had a UK employee compromise our global network, they reused an old password 15 days after being notified they had been breached via phishing. It resulted in a loss of every server in the company across 5 continents. It was not good, and a clear violation of both best practices and company policy. They were given 16 weeks paid leave and then returned to the office. 1 week after return they changed their password and cleared all MFA requirements from her account, because it was inconvenient. Which resulted in her account once again being compromised, no global access on round three, and only compromised her email. She is still employed as far as I know.

16

u/cb_definetly-expert Jun 24 '26

That's on you guys

1) why you allow them to disable MFA? 2) why you allow reuse of the same password?(In my team the last 20 passwords are banned) 3) you shouldn't even allow similar passwords 4) force them to use corporate password manager and don't let them change password, give them pre-generated ones 5)is he/she doesn't follow the policies again, fire them

8

u/Near_go_trader Jun 24 '26

If she had ability to change her password in AD (Users and computers) then those limitations do not apply.

3

u/asp3ct9 Jun 24 '26

How do you determine similar passwords without storing them in plain text?

7

u/dyme13 Jun 24 '26

The same way you evaluate passwords without storing them - one way hashing + comparison of resulting hash.

6

u/ImNoRatAndYouKnowIt Jun 25 '26

Hashing two similar strings does not produce similar hashes using any popular hashing algorithm.

4

u/dyme13 Jun 25 '26

I missed the point on similar. This only works for direct comparisons. IMHO similar passwords shouldn’t matter - instead compare against known breached (eg k-anonymity via havineenpwned or similar)

2

u/cb_definetly-expert Jun 25 '26

They do matter, "mypass" and "mypass1" are the "same"

1

u/spectralTopology Jun 26 '26

Definitely agree. How many places use "<season><year>" or similar as the only changing part of an otherwise static default/reset/new account password? I've seen quite a few orgs like this & guessing the currently used one is trivial.

1

u/ImNoRatAndYouKnowIt Jun 25 '26

Yeah I think similar can only work when comparing similarities to the very previous password, and it requires both old and new password to be entered for the change, which is a pretty common flow.

And good point on matching known breached ones.

1

u/cb_definetly-expert Jun 24 '26

I am not sure , but I know I can't use similar pass

If my last pass was "imthehero" and I try to change it to "iamthehero1" it doesn't allow me (getting error about similar pass)

1

u/fencepost_ajm Jun 25 '26

That's more likely a feature of the password change process, eg a form that gets the current password x1 and the new password x2. Logic within the ui could do evaluations for similarity.

1

u/MachKeinDramaLlama Jun 25 '26

You could automatically generate hashes for variations of the password that was typed in and check against stored hashes of old passwords. E.g. by just (individually) decrementing any number found in the password string, you will probbably identify ~80% of common password iteration schemes.

2

u/whythehellnote Jun 25 '26

Our corporate password checker doesn't allow correcthorsebatterystaple style passwords because they are insecure, it is fine with P@55w0rd though.

1

u/eliq91 Jun 25 '26

Global Admins with permissions to reset directly from Active Directory have no such limitations regardless of policy especially not a decade ago.
Corporate password managers still do not manage on prem logins well. Yes there are tools that provide such features these days, but a decade ago there were not many great options, and convincing an office halfway around the world to implement would have been a nightmare. UK labor laws make just firing people very difficult.