"These are not brute force attacks," said Agarwal. Sentry MBA comes with a graphical user interface that makes it possible for a criminal with very basic skills to create a very sophisticated attack, said Agarwal. Hundreds of millions of stolen credentials are already available for sale on underground forums, a result of the recent wave of breaches.
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With Sentry MBA, criminals buy an off-the-shelf, ready-to-go solution and pair it with a list of stolen credentials. Building a botnet, stealing credentials from another site, bypassing CAPTCHAs and other security mechanisms are all difficult tasks. Putting all these pieces together into a targeted attack against a particular organization is not a simple task for a would-be attacker.
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MORE ON CSO: How to spot a phishing email "Anyone who's using a CAPTCHA to try to keep automation at bay is not even introducing a significant road block," he said. But the attack traffic comes during regular business hours, domestic to the country where you do business in, from unwittingly compromised machines belonging to real users."įinally, to get around CAPTCHA challenges, attackers use optical character recognition.Īccording to Ghosemajumder, every single CAPTCHA-type system has been shown to be vulnerable to optical character recognition attacks for the past several years. "If they all came from a country where i don't even do business, that would be easy to defend. "If they were coming from the same computer, it would be very obvious to defend against," said Sumit Agarwal, Shape Security's co-founder and vice president of strategy. To bypass systems that look for multiple attacks from a single IP address, attackers use botnets to make it seem like the login attempts are all coming from different, and normally law-abiding computers. "The idea behind all of them is to try to identify patterns in IP address, and the problem is that attackers are now using botnets to bypass those defenses."Īccording to Shape Security, an average of 1 to 2 percent of stolen credentials from one site will work on a second site, meaning that a list of a million credentials will result in 10,000 hijacked accounts. "You have all of these technologies that companies have deployed to try to protect against different forms of attack," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, vice president of product management at Shape Security.
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Since the attack go after a different user name with each new attempt, no one account sees a suspicious number of failed logins.
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ALSO ON CSO: How to respond to ransomware threats Plus, defending organizations have learned to stop these kinds of attacks by blocking multiple attempts to log into the same account, or multiple login attempts from the same IP address.Ī credential stuffing attack increases the attackers success rate and reduces the time it takes to break into accounts by using stolen lists of working login IDs and passwords from other sites, since many people use the same email addresses and passwords as their credentials in multiple locations. It's a difficult, time-consuming process. The traditional "brute force" method of breaking into a user account requires the attacker to try numerous combinations of login ID and password. A new report released by Shape Security yesterday details how the Sentry MBA tool makes credential stuffing attacks more widely available to cybercriminals.