Sunday, 15 June 2025

A threat actor can intercept or extract authentication tokens from memory, local storage on a legitimate device, or by inspecting network traffic. The attacker might replay those tokens to bypass authentication controls on users and devices, get unauthorized access to sensitive data, or run further attacks. Because these tokens are valid and time bound, traditional anomaly detection often fails to flag the activity, which might allow sustained access until the token expires or is revoked.

If privileged role activations aren't restricted to dedicated Privileged Access Workstations (PAWs), threat actors can exploit compromised endpoint devices to perform privileged escalation attacks from unmanaged or noncompliant workstations. Standard productivity workstations often contain attack vectors such as unrestricted web browsing, email clients vulnerable to phishing, and locally installed applications with potential vulnerabilities. When administrators activated privileged roles from these workstations, threat actors who gain initial access through malware, browser exploits, or social engineering can then use the locally cached privileged credentials or hijack existing authenticated sessions to escalate their privileges. Privileged role activations grant extensive administrative rights across Microsoft Entra ID and connected services, so attackers can create new administrative accounts, modify security policies, access sensitive data across all organizational resources, and deploy malware or backdoors throughout the environment to establish persistent access. This lateral movement from a compromised endpoint to privileged cloud resources represents a critical attack path that bypasses many traditional security controls. The privileged access appears legitimate when originating from an authenticated administrator's session.

Tenant Restrictions v2 (TRv2) allows organizations to enforce policies that restrict access to specified Microsoft Entra tenants, preventing unauthorized exfiltration of corporate data to external tenants using local accounts. Without TRv2, threat actors can exploit this vulnerability, which leads to potential data exfiltration and compliance violations, followed by credential harvesting if those external tenants have weaker controls. Once credentials are obtained, threat actors can gain initial access to these external tenants. TRv2 provides the mechanism to prevent users from authenticating to unauthorized tenants. Otherwise, threat actors can move laterally, escalate privileges, and potentially exfiltrate sensitive data, all while appearing as legitimate user activity that bypasses traditional data loss prevention controls focused on internal tenant monitoring.

Configuring password reset notifications for administrator roles in Microsoft Entra ID enhances security by notifying privileged administrators when another administrator resets their password. This visibility helps detect unauthorized or suspicious activity that could indicate credential compromise or insider threats. Without these notifications, malicious actors could exploit elevated privileges to establish persistence, escalate access, or extract sensitive data. Proactive notifications support quick action, preserve privileged access integrity, and strengthen the overall security posture.

- User sign-in traffic on browsers and *modern authentication* clients. Applications or cloud services that use legacy authentication fall back to federated authentication flows. An example of legacy authentication might be Exchange online with modern authentication turned off, or Outlook 2010, which doesn't support modern authentication.

Without approval workflows, threat actors who compromise Global Administrator credentials through phishing, credential stuffing, or other authentication bypass techniques can immediately activate the most privileged role in a tenant without any other verification or oversight. Privileged Identity Management (PIM) allows eligible role activations to become active within seconds, so compromised credentials can allow near-instant privilege escalation. Once activated, threat actors can use the Global Administrator role to use the following attack paths to gain persistent access to the tenant:

To configure single sign-on on **GitHub Enterprise Managed User** side, you can follow the documentation for [configuring your Identity Provider in the GitHub documentation](https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/admin/managing-iam/configuring-authentication-for-enterprise-managed-users/configuring-saml-single-sign-on-for-enterprise-managed-users#configure-your-enterprise).

author: shlipsey3

author: HULKsmashGithub

author: HULKsmashGithub

author: HULKsmashGithub

App instance property lock prevents changes to sensitive properties of a multitenant application after the application is provisioned in another tenant. Without a lock, critical properties such as application credentials can be maliciously or unintentionally modified, causing disruptions, increased risk, unauthorized access, or privilege escalations.

Allowing unrestricted external collaboration with unverified organizations can increase the risk surface area of the tenant because it allows guest accounts that might not have proper security controls. Threat actors can attempt to gain access by compromising identities in these loosely governed external tenants. Once granted guest access, they can then use legitimate collaboration pathways to infiltrate resources in your tenant and attempt to gain sensitive information. Threat actors can also exploit misconfigured permissions to escalate privileges and try different types of attacks.

Without named locations configured in Microsoft Entra ID, threat actors can exploit the absence of location intelligence to conduct attacks without triggering location-based risk detections or security controls. When organizations fail to define named locations for trusted networks, branch offices, and known geographic regions, Microsoft Entra ID Protection can't assess location-based risk signals. Not having these policies in place can lead to increased false positives that create alert fatigue and potentially mask genuine threats. This configuration gap prevents the system from distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate locations. For example, legitimate sign-ins from corporate networks and suspicious authentication attempts from high-risk locations (anonymous proxy networks, Tor exit nodes, or regions where the organization has no business presence). Threat actors can use this uncertainty to conduct credential stuffing attacks, password spray campaigns, and initial access attempts from malicious infrastructure without triggering location-based detections that would normally flag such activity as suspicious. Organizations can also lose the ability to implement adaptive security policies that could automatically apply stricter authentication requirements or block access entirely from untrusted geographic regions. Threat actors can maintain persistence and conduct lateral movement from any global location without encountering location-based security barriers, which should serve as an extra layer of defense against unauthorized access attempts.

Configuring workload identity based on risk policy in Microsoft Entra ID is a critical security measure that ensures only trusted and verified workloads can access sensitive resources. Without these policies, threat actors can compromise workload identities with minimal detection to perform further attacks. The lack of conditional controls for risk detections, such as anomalous activity, allows malicious operations like token forgery, sensitive resource access, and disruption of workloads to proceed unchecked. The lack of automated containment mechanisms increases dwell time and impacts the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical services.

When guest users are assigned highly privileged directory roles such as Global Administrator or Privileged Role Administrator, organizations create significant security vulnerabilities that threat actors can exploit for initial access through compromised external accounts or business partner environments. Since guest users originate from external organizations without direct control of security policies, threat actors who compromise these external identities can gain privileged access to the target organization's Microsoft Entra tenant.

Microsoft services applications that operate in your tenant are identified as service principals with the owner organization ID "f8cdef31-a31e-4b4a-93e4-5f571e91255a." When these service principals have credentials configured in your tenant, they might create potential attack vectors that threat actors can exploit. If an administrator added the credentials and they're no longer needed, they can become a target for attackers. Although less likely when proper preventive and detective controls are in place on privileged activities, threat actors can also maliciously add credentials. In either case, threat actors can use these credentials to authenticate as the service principal, gaining the same permissions and access rights as the Microsoft service application. This initial access can lead to privilege escalation if the application has high-level permissions, allowing lateral movement across the tenant. Attackers can then proceed to data exfiltration or persistence establishment through creating other backdoor credentials.

This article tracks the changes in each released version of the Global Secure Access client for Windows.

The Global Secure Access client secures network traffic at the end-user device. This article describes how to download and install the Windows client.

manager: dougeby