With a simple cookie check, anyone with access to the same Wi-Fi hotspot with that cookie can essentially ‘be’ you. This cookie hijacking extension was created to shine the light on the weak security measures of popular websites at the time.įiresheep exposed the security risk of websites only encrypting your login. Remember Firesheep? Back in 2010, a coder named Eric Butler created a Firefox extension that sniffs out and steals cookies of popular websites from a browsing session of users on the same Wi-Fi hotspot. Modern MFA attacks work exactly the same way: these malware programs wait for you to log on to a website, steal your session cookie and send it to the attacker. Grimes first wrote about cookie hijacking in 1989, when Bancos Trojans were wreaking havoc for banks in Brazil and South America. Pass the cookie attacks might sound new to you, but according to Grimes, these types of attacks have been around for decades. But if you’re using MFA, all that effort may be squandered if they fall for a convincing phish that leads to a cookie hijacking job. Their awareness may even prevent them from divulging their passwords over the phone or email. Your employees may have the most secure passwords and might possess enough awareness to use different passwords for different websites, applications and resources.

That’s how dollars get stolen, because people thought they were safer and couldn’t get hacked.” “In about ninety percent of MFA cases, I can send you an email or regular phishing email that gets right around your MFA - like it wasn’t even there,” says Grimes. Everything is hackable, and MFA is no different.”Īfter speaking with numerous end-users and even computer security professionals, Grimes is concerned that too many people believe that they’re far less likely to be phished because they’re using MFA. It’s not necessarily such a bad design decision. With SIM swapping, I can claim to be anybody. “You can’t stop MFA that relies upon messaging to verify your identity,” he says. In this attack, threat actors duplicate the subscriber identification module (SIM) card on the victim’s phone to take over the person’s calls and messages. Grimes explained that MFA’s vulnerability comes down to the way it was designed. “There are over a dozen ways to attack different MFA solutions,” he says. Roger Grimes, defense evangelist for KnowBe4 and author of “ Hacking Multifactor Authentication,” says that while MFA reduces security risk, most attacks that could succeed against single-factor authentication are also useful against MFA solutions. What security risks are associated with cookies?.How do the popular ‘pass the cookie’ and other cookie hijacking attacks work?.This article will answer these key questions: To get the most out of MFA, the more you know, the better. Far too often, people get complacent and become lulled into a false sense of security. While deploying MFA in your organization is always better than not using it, it’s critical to understand that it’s not foolproof.

If you’re a victim of cookie hijacking, MFA won’t help you. With the right cookies, attackers can gain unlimited access to resources. Cookies are powerful, and in some cases, more so than passwords. One MFA attack is ‘pass the cookie,’ which allows threat actors to hijack browser cookies to authenticate as another user in a completely different browser session on another system, bypassing MFA checkpoints along the way. We sat down with an expert to talk about what to do about it. Cookie hijacking in particular is a problem.

But with remote work becoming the norm and the attack surface widening with more apps, devices and systems connecting than ever before, threat actors are working overtime to beat MFA. Multifactor authentication (MFA) is a great way to prevent threat actors from using stolen credentials to access your network.

Hijacking in computer security