Credential Stuffing
Chris Merchant
Director of Sales & Marketing @ Remora | Developing Innovative Cyber Security Strategies for Clients and Partners
The coronavirus crisis has meant a number of changes to how business is conducted, the biggest difference on a day to day basis has been the increase in Zoom or Teams for video conferencing.
The use of these tools has brought back a blast from the past with credential stuffing, where fraudulently gaining valid credentials for one site, allows cyber criminals to use the same credentials on other sites and gain access to those other legitimate accounts.
Credential stuffing used to have a small success rate, but new techniques and our own stupidity has led us to making life easier for cyber criminals, now over 700 000 login credentials for Zoom accounts are for sale on the dark web, the collation of these accounts in these numbers would simply not be possible if people did not create their Zoom account using the same username and password that they used elsewhere.
Cyber criminals are also utilising advances in automation and botnet technology to make credential stuffing a more viable attack. Security features built into web application logins often include deliberate time delays and IP address blocking for users who have repeatedly failed login attempts. Modern credential stuffing strategies attempt to avoid these defences by simultaneously attempting logins that appear to come from different device types and IP addresses.
Traditional prevention techniques are largely unsuccessful in mitigating credential stuffing attacks, as they are not designed to defend against attacks coming from a wide range of sources.
It is hard to prevent these sophisticated attacks, but the route cause of the attacks can be prevented through employee cyber education. Your staff are being targeted right now as cyber criminals know this offers them the easiest and cheapest route into your organisation. You can prevent this from happening to you through the Remora Staff Awareness Training, where your employees can develop the most up-to-date understanding of the cyber risks they face and how to mitigate them, enabling them to remain safe, both at work and at home. In turn your staff will go from your biggest cyber security threat to your best cyber security asset.
www.remora.co.uk #credentialstuffing #databreach #cybersecurity