An application owner reports suspicious activity on an internal financial application from various internal users within the past 14 days. A security analyst notices the following:
*Financial transactions were occurring during irregular time frames and outside of business hours by unauthorized users.
*Internal users in question were changing their passwords frequently during that time period.
*A jump box that several domain administrator users use to connect to remote devices was recently compromised.
*The authentication method used in the environment is NTLM.
Which of the following types of attacks is MOST likely being used to gain unauthorized access?
Correct Answer: A
Explanation
The suspicious activity reported by the application owner, combined with the recent compromise of the jump box and the use of NTLM authentication, suggests that an attacker is likely using a pass-the-hash attack to gain unauthorized access to the financial application. This type of attack involves stealing hashed passwords from memory and then using them to authenticate as the compromised user without needing to know the user's plaintext password. References: CompTIA Security+ Study Guide, Exam SY0-601, 4th Edition, Chapter 5