Account Takeover
Noun · Security & Infosec
Definitions
Account Takeover is an attack technique in which an adversary steals or reuses authentication material so an attacker can operate as a legitimate user account. Defenders analyze it to understand prerequisites, affected trust boundaries, and likely telemetry, then reduce risk with layered controls such as validation, hardening, rate limits, segmentation, and high-quality logging for investigation and response.
In plain English: Account Takeover is a way attackers abuse systems or trust relationships, and defenders counter it with better design, validation, monitoring, and layered controls.
Example: "During the assessment, the team simulated Account Takeover against a staging service, confirmed the weakness with logs and telemetry, and then added tighter validation, safer defaults, and monitoring so the same technique would trigger an alert in production."
Related Terms
- Anti-Debugging
- Anti-Malware
- Anti-Tamper
- API Abuse
- Application Allowlisting
- Binary Analysis
- Binary Patching
- Bluetooth Sniffing
- Business Email Compromise
- Card Skimming
- Click Fraud
- Code Obfuscation
- Command and Control
- Data Exfiltration
- Data Poisoning
- Defense in Depth
- Denial of Service
- Directory Traversal
- DoS Amplification
- Double Free
- Drive-by Download
- Eavesdropping
- Email Bombing
- Evil Twin
- Human Firewall
- ICMP Tunneling
- IDS Evasion
- Integer Overflow
- Isolation
- Jailbreak
- Kerberoasting
- MAC Flooding
- Macro Virus
- Malicious Insider
- Man-in-the-Browser
- Mass Assignment
- Mobile Security
- Man-in-the-Middle
- RASP
- Application Hardening
- Computer Network Defense