Happy Halloween! 🎃

In the latest episode of our All Things Cyber podcast, my colleagues Tim Grieveson (Chief Security Officer) and Stephane Konarkowski (Chief Product Officer) walk us through four true tales of exposure they’ve had to deal with; seemingly small, quiet failures that became full-blown digital nightmares.

Below I stitch those tales together: the ghostly behaviors in network traffic, the forensic reveals, and the practical fixes that turned terror into containment. If you want the full stories with that unique practitioner commentary, watch the full episode:

1. The Casino Fish-Tank Hack:  How a Thermostat Opened a VIP Vault

The scare: In a luxury casino, a brand-new cloud-enabled aquarium thermostat became the unlikely pivot for attackers. That little device gave the bad actor a toehold, and before long they were moving laterally until they touched the high-rollers database.

Why it’s scary: This is a classic tale of supply-chain + IoT risk: a vendor-supplied device, public cloud endpoints, and no segmentation between “nice-to-have” and crown-jewel systems. Attackers didn’t need a flashy exploit, they needed an overlooked device and a route inward.

What stopped it: Network microsegmentation, immediate device inventory and vendor hardening, and egress controls that prevented the thermostat’s management channel from talking to anything sensitive. The casino also added continuous external discovery of vendor endpoints (so they could see any cloud hosts the thermostat phoned home to).

Relevant security measures:

• Inventory every vendor device and the cloud endpoints they use.

• Require vendor security attestations and cloud-hosting details during procurement.

• Segment IoT / vendor devices from critical systems.

• Monitor for unusual lateral movement and unexpected egress.
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“The casino had invested on all the things that you'd expect them to: firewalls, IDS, IPS, security guards, physical CCTV... yet the attacker went silently undetected through a device deemed of low importance in terms of network traffic.”

Tim Grieveson, Chief Security Officer

2. The Zombi Plugin: A Malicious Redirect That Wouldn’t Go Away

The scare: Whenever they tried to login, customers were being redirected to strange pages. The admin team saw nothing obvious at first, but a deep look into the CMS revealed a malicious plugin. Not an updated version of the known module, but a completely different file. Inside that plugin was a small piece of code redirecting visitors to a newly-registered domain that pushed malware onto anyone who tried to log in. Worse, the attackers had built a callback mechanism into the site so the malware installer could reinstall itself even after someone removed the plugin.

Why it’s scary: Cleanup that looks successful but then the malware reappears is literally zombi behavior. Persistence via callbacks, cron-like registrars, or remote installers lets an attacker come back long after you think you’re safe. For the company, this was terrifying: real users were being infected, trust evaporated, and the infection kept returning.

What stopped it: Identify and remove the persistence callbacks, patch the injection points, and put a monitoring window over the site for several days. The remediation included provenance checks on all plugins, checksum validation, and a policy that prevents ad-hoc admin installs without change control.

Relevant security measures:

• Tighten admin access, rotate credentials and enforce MFA on all admin accounts.

• Verify plugin provenance and only install those from vetted sources, validating file size and version history.

• Harden change control & deployment, requiring change tickets and peer review for all admin installs.

• Hunt for persistence mechanisms, such as callback URLs, cron jobs, remote installers, and hidden includes.

3. The Digital Ghost Altering Retail Inventory

The scare: Exclusive gaming consoles kept “vanishing” from inventory at certain points in the month and then reappearing. No external breach, no data exfiltration; just an odd code change that made the item disappear long enough for the attacker (a hardcore gamer with insider help) to buy the consoles at a lower price.

Why it’s scary: Nothing about this looked like a classic compromise. The attacker didn’t need to crash accounts or break encryption. They altered behavior at the application layer so that business systems simply didn’t notice the theft. Insiders made it stealthy.

What stopped it: Runtime integrity checks, CI/CD code scanning, and a procurement process that now includes vetting developer access for third parties. When the company adopted automated transaction reconciliation and alerts for unusual stock dips, the scheme became detectable.

Relevant security measures:

• Enforce code signing and CI/CD scanning for third-party code.

• Run periodic runtime integrity and reconciliation checks.

• Vet and rotate third-party developer credentials; log and alert on privileged changes.

• Treat inventory anomalies as a forensic signal (not a merchandising glitch).

4. The Phantom Bank Login Leading to a Forgotten Vault

The scare: A fake banking application phoned home to attacker-controlled domains. A careful crash test exposed a cluster of URLs, which led to an unsecured database. Funny enough, this was a tidy cache of harvested usernames and passwords: the cybercriminal’s “holy grail” was left unlocked.

Why it’s scary: Let’s say this one was scarier for the attacker who forgot to lock their own storage. For companies and end users, the real horror were the AI-powered vishing campaigns prompting customers to log in in the fake app.

What stopped it: Crash-hunting and code inspection revealed the URL trail; rapid takedowns of domains and user notification prevented further compromise. Operationally, the bank strengthened verification processes, domain, and credential monitoring.

Relevant security measures:

• Teach customers to verify phone calls (always call back on a known number).

• Monitor for spoofed pages and register takedown workflows with legal.

• Script crash-tests against public apps in a safe sandbox to discover hidden endpoints.

• Monitor for leaked credential stores and rotate compromised accounts.

Why these stories matter

These four tales of exposure have a lot in common: they’re quiet, they exploit trust, and they only get scary when systems treat them as low priority. Like the casino overlooking the fish-tank IoT thermostat because it’s a non-network connected device.  

The truth is big breaches are often the inevitable outcome of many small oversights, and our latest research confirms it: 1 in 3 certificates are misconfigured, and companies are still overlooking basics like unencrypted logins and DNS records.

At ThingsRecon, we turn discovery into decision-ready intelligence: continuous, deep discovery is couple by supplier context (financial, geopolitical, compliance), and a practical measure of Digital Proximity™ (Patent Pending) to tell you which exposures are closest to your crown jewels. That lets you stop being distracted by noise and start putting fixes where they do the most good.

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