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Attacker tactics and validation
Endpoint illusion
Your EDR dashboard looks normal. The penetration test passed. The SOC team playbooks are in place. The unspoken assumption is that the EDR solution detects an attacker's lateral movement and that the team reacts in time. That assumption is rarely tested.
2–4 days
How long a skilled attacker can operate undetected on a corporate endpoint, even with mature EDR. Source: Syndis, adversarial validation data 2025–2026.
0
LSASS material that can be reused in replay attacks when running passwordless FIDO2. There are no password hashes or tokens to extract.
T1003
The MITRE ATT&CK technique for dumping credentials from LSASS. This was the most common method observed across tested client intrusions.
The assumption
Many security teams trust their EDR. Vendor dashboards look healthy, penetration tests pass without findings, and SOC playbooks are in place. The implicit belief is that the EDR will detect lateral movement and the team will respond in time.
The reality
Skilled adversaries disable local security agents or blind their telemetry before harvesting credentials, leaving the SOC blind. EDR agents run locally and rely on the integrity of the host. An adversary with elevated local privileges—often gained by dumping LSASS—can manipulate the agent. The dashboard remains green while the adversary moves laterally across the network.
The target architecture
Run adversarial validation against LSASS dumping and application control bypasses, then remove the credential as a target. A passwordless architecture using FIDO2 security keys binds authentication to a physical device via asymmetric cryptography. No shared secret remains in memory to extract.
Implementation steps
Track 1: Identify the detection gap. Run a 2–4 day live exercise against a production corporate workstation. Test LSASS credential dumping (including Mimikatz variants), LOLBins bypasses, and agent blinding. The outcome is a measured baseline of your detection gap.
Track 2: Remove the credential as a target. Deploy passwordless authentication using FIDO2 security keys. The private key never leaves the device. Even full access to LSASS yields nothing to replay.
Sequencing: Validate first to understand the exposure, then implement passwordless authentication to close the structural gap. Validation results provide the mandate required to accelerate deployment.
Sources
Syndis, adversarial validation of production endpoints, 2025–2026
MITRE ATT&CK T1003.001 (LSASS credential dumping)
Ciptor, passwordless deployment telemetry, 2024–2026
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