On the Internet we can find practically everything. And yes, there are also pages where they trade with stolen cards, passwords, keys to log in remotely or even malicious software to infect other users. In this article we echo a news item that reports on how the price of stolen keys to log in to remote desktops has dropped . That is a bad sign.
Lower the price of stolen RDP credentials
Accessing our computers remotely has become very common in our day to day. Everything related to the cloud, teleworking, remote access, has gained a lot of weight, especially due to the pandemic. Now, this can also cause security problems if we don’t protect ourselves properly.
Precisely the keys to access remote desktops is something that has been very present in the forums of the Dark Web. They sell access through Remote Desktop Protocol or RDP. They do this after there has been some kind of leak or after carrying out an attack on a company or organization.
Keep in mind that the remote desktop protocol allows workers to connect securely to your organization’s servers remotely. This is a practice that has grown during 2020 as employees increasingly work from home. Administrator accounts also use RDP frequently, allowing IT and security teams to perform updates and support users.
The problem is that a misconfigured or protected RDP server or account can provide network access to cybercriminals . This can lead to stolen or weak passwords being guessed.
Easier to steal remote desktop credentials
The main issue is that now a group of security researchers has seen that in recent times the price of these credentials has dropped significantly. That is a bad sign.
Why is it a bad sign? It basically means that there is more supply. Cybercriminals have a greater ability to steal these remote access keys due to misconfigured servers, uncorrected vulnerabilities, or weak passwords.
In other words, it means that there are more remote desktop access keys available. There have been more robberies and that tells us that something is not being done right.
To avoid this, prevent the keys from ending up for sale on the Internet, we can carry out different actions. One of them, something very important, is never to use default credentials and to create passwords that are really strong and complex.
Another very important step to protect your accounts is to enable two-factor authentication . An extra security barrier that is increasingly present between the different platforms that we use in our day to day. In this way, even if they managed to figure out the password, they would not be able to access the account.