Adversaries may use a single or small list of commonly used passwords against many different accounts to attempt to acquire valid account credentials. Password spraying uses one password (e.g. 'Password01'), or a small list of commonly used passwords, that may match the complexity policy of the domain. Logins are attempted with that password against many different accounts on a network to avoid account lockouts that would normally occur when brute forcing a single account with many passwords. (Citation: BlackHillsInfosec Password Spraying) Typically, management services over commonly used ports are used when password spraying. Commonly targeted services include the following: * SSH (22/TCP) * Telnet (23/TCP) * FTP (21/TCP) * NetBIOS / SMB / Samba (139/TCP & 445/TCP) * LDAP (389/TCP) * Kerberos (88/TCP) * RDP / Terminal Services (3389/TCP) * HTTP/HTTP Management Services (80/TCP & 443/TCP) * MSSQL (1433/TCP) * Oracle (1521/TCP) * MySQL (3306/TCP) * VNC (5900/TCP) In addition to management services, adversaries may "target single sign-on (SSO) and cloud-based applications utilizing federated authentication protocols," as well as externally facing email applications, such as Office 365.(Citation: US-CERT TA18-068A 2018) In order to avoid detection thresholds, adversaries may deliberately throttle password spraying attempts to avoid triggering security alerting. Additionally, adversaries may leverage LDAP and Kerberos authentication attempts, which are less likely to trigger high-visibility events such as Windows "logon failure" event ID 4625 that is commonly triggered by failed SMB connection attempts.(Citation: Microsoft Storm-0940)

Linked Issues

Issuelinks
Linktype Issue
is related to Techniques
is blocked by Multi-factor Authentication
is blocked by Distributed Password Spraying via Authentication Failures Across Multiple Accounts
is blocked by Password Policies
is blocked by Account Use Policies
is blocked by Security, Compliance & Resilience Controls Oversight
is blocked by Secure Baseline Configurations
is blocked by Continuous Monitoring
is blocked by Use of External Technology Assets, Applications and/or Services (TAAS)
is blocked by Separation of Duties (SoD)
is blocked by Identification & Authentication for Organizational Users
is blocked by Identifier Management (User Names)
is blocked by Authenticator Management
is blocked by Re-Authentication
is blocked by Account Management
is blocked by Access Enforcement
is blocked by Least Privilege
is blocked by Account Lockout
Impressum German English