A report from the identity-management provider Okta revealed the popularity of a login attack called “credential stuffing.”
Not a side at IT Thanksgiving, credential stuffing is a persistent, frequently bot-driven tactic that takes advantage of a user’s tendency to reuse the same username and/or password over and over again. An attacker attempts logins with the already-compromised username and passwords, hoping that the captured credentials work across multiple sites, like a bank and a retailer.
Okta found a bunch of these attacks: 34% of the traffic on its Auth0 authentication platform, according to the company’s research, showed characteristics of credential stuffing, like bursts of failed logins.
The rise in credential stuffing revealed that bots are busier than ever, and a variety of defenses are needed to counter the persistent attacks.
“Obviously, a lot of this is driven by bots. And so we really need to be thinking about what [we’re] doing in the observability space to help us also use that same intelligence to fight those bots off,” Jameeka Green Aaron, CISO at Okta, told IT Brew.
Bot, bot, pwn. Firing off a bunch of login attempts at once, from one location, would seem suspicious to a network administrator, so password stuffers are often careful to mask their IP addresses, take over machines, and appear to be coming from a variety of destinations, according to Duncan Greatwood, CEO at the cybersec platform provider Xage Security.
Website operators can monitor login activity and boot suspicious bursts of authentication failures, but bots often sneak by corporate defenses, according to Zach Capers, senior analyst at GetApp, an online resource for SaaS applications.
Read the rest here.—BH
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