The target: The Kentucky office of Unemployment Insurance.
The take: Unauthorized access to claimant accounts which had the ability to alter the destination bank accounts of the benefit payments, forwarding the funds to fraudsters.
The attack vector: Attackers leveraged the lack of robust password hygiene and modern credential management in Unemployment Office’s IT systems. It was reported that some 4000 users had created passwords such as “1-2-3-4” and 1500 used the phrase “2020”, both easily exploited with moderate computing power and password cracking applications.
Enforcing strong password management across all platforms is critical to protecting customer data. Industry standard practices of password length, complexity, two-factor authentication, and email verification will only be effective if these methods are enforced. Doing so will ensure users, and their data, are protected as much as possible.