CASE FILE RT-0142 Financial sector

From a job posting to Domain Admin in six days

Six days from a public job posting to the core payment database of a regional bank — through a home NAS, an MFA push storm and one reused password. The objective was reached without a single custom exploit.

Objective: Access the core payment-processing database of a regional bank
Path: A developer’s home-network NAS, exposed by a forgotten port forward, yielded corporate VPN credentials saved in a browser profile. MFA was enforced — but the VPN portal allowed push-fatigue spam. Push #14 was approved on a Friday evening. From the VPN, an outdated internal CI server reused the same local-admin password across 60+ hosts; the DPAPI-protected credentials of a tier-0 operator were recoverable from a misconfigured build agent.
Detected: The MFA-fatigue burst triggered no alert; the pass-the-hash across CI hosts fired a single low-severity rule nobody owned

After: Number-matching + PIN enforced, local-admin passwords randomized, unowned alert rules reassigned — the same scenario retested clean three months later.

Names, sectors and infrastructure details are changed; timelines and tradecraft are not. More case files →

The pattern in one page

Credentials outlive devices. Browser profiles, DPAPI blobs and build agents hold tier-0 secrets nobody inventories.
Reusable local-admin passwords turn one host into sixty. Randomize per host, or use LAPS-style rotation.
An MFA prompt storm is an attack, not an annoyance. If push #14 works, number-matching and PIN are not optional.

Recognize the pattern?

We can verify	Typical effort
The same path against your estate, under signed ROE	2–4 wks
Detection validation: what your SOC would have seen	included
Retest after fixes, within three months	free

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