Brinztech Alert: Local Admin Access to 360 Hosts at US Company on Sale, SentinelOne EDR Bypassed

Dark Web News Analysis

A critical and highly credible threat has been identified on a prominent cybercrime forum. An Initial Access Broker (IAB) is advertising the sale of widespread unauthorized access to the internal network of a mid-sized U.S. company with an approximate revenue of $14 million.

This is an extremely serious security incident, representing the final stage before a devastating attack. The access being sold is a massive foothold, providing local administrator privileges on approximately 360 individual hosts (workstations or servers) deep inside the company’s network. The buyer, almost certainly a major ransomware affiliate, will leverage this widespread access to achieve a swift and complete network compromise.

Most alarmingly, the seller explicitly mentions the presence of the endpoint security agent **”av Sentinel tox *“, strongly implying that the SentinelOne EDR solution is deployed on the network and that the attacker has successfully bypassed, disabled, or neutralized it. This claim, if true, indicates a sophisticated intrusion that has already evaded a key layer of the company’s defenses, making the threat significantly more severe.

Key Cybersecurity Insights

This access-for-sale listing presents several immediate and catastrophic threats:

• Massive Foothold for Rapid Lateral Movement and Network Takeover: Local administrator rights on 360 separate machines is a powerful beachhead for a “land and expand” operation. The attacker can use tools like Mimikatz on each of these hosts to dump credentials (including those of higher-privileged domain users who may have logged into them), disable local security controls, and pivot from machine to machine until they achieve full Domain Admin rights and a complete network takeover.
• Direct Precursor to a Catastrophic Ransomware Attack: The sale of established, widespread access by a professional IAB is the primary way that major ransomware gangs launch their attacks. The buyer will use this access to first exfiltrate massive amounts of sensitive corporate data for a “double extortion” threat. Once the data is stolen, they will deploy ransomware across all 360+ hosts simultaneously, paralyzing the business and demanding a multi-million dollar ransom.
• Evasion of Advanced Endpoint Security (EDR) is a Critical Failure Signal: The specific claim of bypassing SentinelOne is a major red flag. It suggests that the initial intrusion and the attacker’s ability to gain privileged access were achieved using sophisticated techniques that evaded a modern EDR solution. This could indicate a zero-day exploit, a successful defense evasion technique, a critical misconfiguration in the company’s SentinelOne deployment (e.g., policies in “detect-only” mode), or a failure in its security operations monitoring to detect and respond to the initial alerts.

Mitigation Strategies

In response to a threat of this magnitude and sophistication, the targeted company and others must take immediate and decisive action:

• Assume Compromise and Activate Immediate Threat Hunting: The company must operate under the assumption that it is actively and deeply compromised. A full-scale, emergency incident response and threat hunting operation must be initiated. This includes a forensic review of logs from all endpoints, VPNs, and Domain Controllers to hunt for any indicators of compromise, with a special focus on anomalous administrative activity, suspicious PowerShell usage, and any alerts from SentinelOne that may have been missed.
• Implement and Enforce Strict Privileged Access Management (PAM) and LAPS: The core of this breach is compromised local privilege. It is critical to enforce the principle of least privilege. The passwords for all local administrator accounts across the enterprise must be immediately randomized, made unique, and rotated, ideally using an automated solution like Microsoft’s Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS). This single step can severely hinder an attacker’s ability to move laterally.
• Audit and Harden Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Configuration: The potential failure of the EDR solution is a critical concern. The company must conduct an immediate and thorough audit of its SentinelOne deployment. This includes ensuring all agents are active and updated, that all protection policies are set to “Block and Quarantine” rather than “Detect-only,” and that alert triage and investigation procedures are robust enough to catch the subtle signs of a sophisticated intrusion.

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