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.^[1]

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.^[2]

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.^[3]

References

1. Thyer, J. (2015, October 30). Password Spraying & Other Fun with RPCCLIENT. Retrieved April 25, 2017.
2. US-CERT. (2018, March 27). TA18-068A Brute Force Attacks Conducted by Cyber Actors. Retrieved October 2, 2019.
3. Microsoft Threat Intelligence. (2024, October 31). Chinese threat actor Storm-0940 uses credentials from password spray attacks from a covert network. Retrieved June 4, 2025.

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