Customer story

Outsourcing / workforce management / BPOEMEAAnonymized

Exposing a multi-actor campaign against HR, payroll, and internal portals

Multiple actor clusters targeted an outsourcing firm’s kiosk, HR, and payroll surfaces simultaneously. Unit6 treated it as one campaign, closing credential abuse and hardening exposed services quickly.

MITRE T1190MITRE T1078MITRE T1110.003MITRE T1556.006

The situation

An outsourcing provider ran several internet-facing portals with limited MFA. Unit6 telemetry flagged unrelated actors converging on the same environment.

What Unit6 detected

  • Unauthenticated kiosk application exposed via a misconfigured IIS server.
  • Valid credentials for internal payroll and employee systems with proof of payslip access.
  • Active password spraying against the HR portal with no throttling or MFA.

Why it mattered

  • Access to HR and payroll data, including salaries and personal identifiers.
  • Tampering with payroll records or payment details.
  • Follow-on compromise of VPNs, admin portals, or production systems via HR-linked identities.
  • Regulatory and employee-relations fallout from bulk data exposure.

What Unit6 did

Rapid credential and access hygiene

  • Rotated credentials for confirmed compromised accounts and invalidated active sessions.
  • Introduced canary credentials to detect reuse attempts.

Segmentation and hardening of exposed services

  • Restricted kiosk exposure through firewall controls and IP allowlisting.
  • Drove a configuration and patch review for the IIS server.

Strengthened HR and payroll authentication

  • Implemented MFA across HR and payroll systems.
  • Added login throttling, geo-fencing, and abnormal login alerts.

Campaign-level threat hunting

  • Correlated timestamps across HR, payroll, and kiosk logs to separate noise from targeted abuse.
  • Distinguished opportunistic scanning from credential-driven intrusion.

Outcome

  • Active compromises contained and exposed attack surface reduced within weeks.
  • HR and payroll shifted from soft targets to hardened, monitored assets.
  • Security leaders gained a campaign-level view that unified previously siloed alerts.

Unit6 edge

  • Actor-centric view that identified multiple groups converging on one organization.
  • Correlation of exposed apps, credentials, and live attack traffic into one narrative for executives.
  • Practical guidance to make legacy HR/payroll systems security-aware without breaking operations.

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