What is a Credential Stuffing Attack?

Look around, and you will find abundant stories of Cybercrime flooding the internet World. Attackers are finding newer ways to steal private customer data from businesses and use them for their own financial benefits. The consequences are even worse for companies whose business is solely based on the Internet. The Akamai’s State of the Internet report says that over 8.3 billion malicious login attempts were identified in May and June this year. These are nothing but Credential Stuffing Attacks. Let’s learn more about it.

What is Credential Stuffing?

While creating a password for your online credit card or internet banking account, you are often asked to create a strong password consisting of a capital letter, special character, number, etc.  Do you come up with something complex as aXZvXjkdA(0LJCjiN? The answer could well be a “No”.

Usually, we try to come up with something we can remember easily. For instance, AjayEarth@34, which satisfies all the preconditions of making a password like it contains a capital letter, a number, and a special character, is still not a password that is hard to break nowadays. It’s worse when you use your birthdates, favorite movie names, favorite Basketball player names, spouse’s name, or even your toddler’s name in your passwords. If this was not enough, we use the same passwords for multiple site logins.

Now, if attackers breach even one of the sites where you log in, your login credentials are exposed and ready to be exploited.

Attackers can then take your credentials and supply them to an automated tool. This tool can run those accounts against a target site to see what credentials will work. Think about what they can do if they can gain access to a retail site or, worse, your banking site. They steal sensitive information or, even worse, transfer money to other accounts they create. This whole activity of fraudulently gaining access to others account is called as Credential Stuffing.

With a Credential stuffing attack, an attacker can use automated scripts and bots to try each credential against a target website. It uses breached credentials to gain access to online accounts fraudulently and can be considered a subset of Brute Force Attacks.

Targets of Credential Stuffing

Apart from normal Internet users, Credential Stuffing attacks target organizations in various industries, including banking, financial services, government, healthcare, education, and more.

Consequences of Credential Stuffing attacks

Victims of Credential Stuffing attacks face financial as well as other tangible losses. Here are some of them:

1. Reputation loss

Almost all businesses store some personally identifiable information on employees or customers, and these companies are legally obligated to protect this information. In case of an information breach, the company is bound to face reputation loss in the market.

2. Regulatory Fines

Leaked customer data or business information can often invite regulatory fines. Governments and regulatory bodies can levy stiff fines based on the severity of the breach. These financial burdens can add up and devastate businesses of all sizes.

3. Operational costs

Companies are bound to incur operational costs due to investigations, remediations, and customer management arising from Credential Stuffing attacks. Depending on the scope of the attack, the cost can scale to millions.

4. Customer loss

Customer loss is revenue loss, and most companies are likely to lose customers if they cannot protect their sensitive business data.

How to prevent Credential Stuffing attacks

Taking some basic precautions is the best way to protect from Credential Stuffing attacks. Here is what all you can do:

1. Best practices for passwords – Adopt best practices when it comes to password management. Set strong and unfamiliar passwords and change them continuously. Also, do not use the same password for multiple logins.
2. Use VPN – With remote access becoming a way of doing business, use of VPN is necessary. A VPN software allows for a secure network connection even on unsecured networks so that employees can safely use their credentials to access the company network from wherever they are.
3. Two-factor authentication – Logins that follow a two-factor authentication offer great protection because the second access code is not stored in a database and hence cannot be trapped. In Two-factor authentication, a password is sent to phone or email and is valid only for 60 sec. This essentially downgrades credential-stuffing attacks to distributed denial of service threats, and hence they cannot penetrate that network’s defenses.
4. Firewalls – Firewalls identify malicious traffic and block the source IP address, shutting down the attack from the source.

Stay safe!

Is Credential Stuffing a DDoS attack?

No, credential stuffing is not a DDoS attack. It is a cyber-attack where criminals use stolen login credentials to gain unauthorized access to accounts, often disguising it as a DDoS attack to evade detection.

What is the difference between Brute Force and Credential Stuffing?

The difference between brute force and credential stuffing is that brute force tries multiple passwords against one or multiple accounts to guess a password, while credential stuffing uses known (breached) username/password pairs against other websites. Credential stuffing exploits breached data, whereas brute force attacks rely on random guesses.

What is a Credential Validation Attack?

A credential validation attack occurs when attackers use stolen or guessed credentials to gain unauthorized access to systems, bypass security measures, and steal sensitive data. This cyberattack exploits weak password policies and insufficient authentication protocols to breach organizational defenses.

Psst: Heard of Password Spray Attacks by the way?