2% success rate equals 60 million successful logins and countless collateral damage in emptying bank accounts, ID theft, ordering goods and services, and advancing other illicit criminal activities. It is called credential stuffing – in more than one way.
In 2011, while serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence at the Pentagon, Shape Security co-founder Sumit Agarwal observed a rising trend in the volume and complexity of automated attacks on web and mobile applications. At that time, he coined the term “credential stuffing” to describe the use of automation to test usernames and passwords stolen from one site on other sites with the intent of taking over a large set of accounts en masse.
This new type of threat exploited not an accidental vulnerability in an application, but rather its correctly implemented functionality: the login form where anyone could enter the right credentials to access an account and its data and privileges. Protecting online services from this threat was the impetus for starting Shape Security with co-founders Derek Smith and Justin Call. Shape also attracted as its CTO, Google’s former click fraud czar, Shuman Ghosemajumder. This is a highly skilled company.
Shape analyses more than one billion high-value transactions per week—primarily login requests—to detect and protect against credential stuffing and other attacks and has been able to observe the global automated use of stolen credentials. It has just released its 32 page, 2017 Credential Spill Report (registration required for a free report) and iTWire has summarised the most salient points.
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2016 Credential Spills: 3.3 billion plus reported – the top ten were
- Yahoo - 1,000,000,000 12/14/2016
- Yahoo - 500,000,000 9/22/2016
- Friend Finder - 412,214,295 11/13/2016
- MySpace - 359,420,698 5/31/2016
- Badoo - 127,343,437 6/2/2016
- LinkedIn - 117,000,000 5/18/2016
- VK 100,544,934 6/5/2016
- Rambler.Ru - 98,167,935 9/5/2016
- Dropbox - 68,680,741 8/30/2016
- Tumblr - 65,469,298 5/12/2016
Technology had the most stolen credentials followed by social media and adult sites.
Credential Stuffing: the use of stolen logins and passwords on other sites has up to a 2% success rate as the same login and password are frequently used on multiple sites.
Most companies have limited or no visibility into, or are unaware of, the volume of automated login traffic from credential stuffing attacks. These attacks appear as legitimate requests to the security controls in place on most applications - brute force techniques that would be blocked are not used. When the simulation of this behaviour is fully automated, credential stuffing attacks can achieve great scale and efficiency.
In fact, Shape observed that 90% of login requests on many of the world’s largest web and mobile applications are coming from credential stuffing. Forgetting cyber crime for a minute, imagine the heavy load that automated traffic places on major websites, taxing infrastructure and adding login latency for real users.
But worse still Shape is seeing up to 2% success rate – over 60 million successful logins on other sites.
Ongoing use of credential spills
Successful logins are quickly sold on the dark web, and broadly resold and exploited. Cyber criminals buy lists, rent botnets, use sophisticated tools to bypass CAPTCHA etc., and sit back and wait for success.
“A breach anywhere is a breach everywhere,” said Ghosemajumder. He says that while for example Yahoo! may reset all users passwords other sites using the same login and password are still at risk.
They are also used for fake account creation, extortion, or money laundering, none of which may be evident to the owner.
Conclusions
Shape says 2016 was the tip of the iceberg - credential spills will continue as cyber criminals continue to exploit security vulnerabilities to steal credentials and sell them on the dark web.
As additional cybercriminals discover how easy both the theft of credentials and the execution of credential stuffing attacks are, it increases both supply and demand for stolen credentials and makes it likely that the pace of credential spills will increase in the coming years.