Credential stuffing assaults had a big impact in 2024, fueled by a vicious circle of infostealer infections and data breaches. However issues might be about to worsen nonetheless with Pc-Utilizing Brokers, a brand new form of AI agent that allows low-cost, low-effort automation of frequent net duties — together with these continuously carried out by attackers.
Stolen credentials: The cyber legal’s weapon of alternative in 2024
Stolen credentials were the #1 attacker action in 2023/24, and the breach vector for 80% of net app assaults. Not stunning when you think about the truth that billions of leaked credentials are in circulation on-line, and attackers can choose up the most recent drop for as little as $10 on legal boards.
The legal market for stolen credentials is benefitting from the publicity of high-profile breaches in 2024 such because the assaults on Snowflake prospects utilizing credentials present in information breach dumps and compromised credential feeds from infostealer and mass phishing campaigns, ensuing within the compromise of 165 buyer tenants and a whole lot of thousands and thousands of breached data.
However regardless of 2024 being an unprecedented 12 months by way of the influence of identity-based assaults, there’s nonetheless lots of unfulfilled potential for attackers to understand.
Credential assault automation — what’s modified with the shift to SaaS?
Brute forcing and credential stuffing are nothing new, and have been a key element of the cyber attacker toolkit for many years. But it surely’s not fairly as simple to robotically spray credentials throughout programs because it as soon as was.
No extra one-size-fits-all
Moderately than a single centralized community with apps and information contained inside an infrastructure perimeter, enterprise IT is now shaped of a whole lot of web-based apps and platforms, creating 1000’s of identities per group.
Which means that identities too at the moment are decentralized and distributed all around the web, versus being saved solely in identification programs like Lively Listing, and carried out utilizing frequent protocols and mechanisms.
Whereas HTTP(S) is commonplace, trendy net apps are advanced and extremely custom-made, with a graphically-driven interface that’s completely different each time. And to make issues worse, trendy net apps are particularly designed to stop malicious automation by means of bot protections like CAPTCHA.
So quite than encountering commonplace protocols and having the ability to write a single set of instruments to make use of throughout any group/surroundings e.g. write a DNS scanner as soon as, use a single port scanner like Nmap for all the web, write a single script per service (e.g. FTP, SSH, Telnet, and many others.) in your password sprayer — customized instrument improvement is as a substitute required for each app that you just need to goal.
Discovering the needle within the haystack
Not solely are there extra environments for attackers to incorporate within the scope of their assault, however there are extra credentials to work with.
There are round 15 billion compromised credentials obtainable on the general public web, not together with these discovered solely in personal channels/feeds. This record is rising all the time — like 244M never-before-seen passwords and 493M distinctive web site and e mail handle pairs being added to Have I Been Pwned from infostealer logs simply final month.
This sounds scary, nevertheless it’s difficult for attackers to harness this information. The overwhelming majority of those credentials are outdated and invalid. A recent review of TI data by Push Security researchers discovered that fewer than 1% of stolen credentials included in menace intelligence feeds from a multi-vendor information set was actionable — in different phrases, 99% of compromised credentials had been false positives.
However not all of them are ineffective — because the Snowflake assaults demonstrated, which efficiently leveraged credentials courting again to 2020. So there are clearly treasures ready to be found by attackers.
Attackers are compelled to prioritize
The distributed nature of apps and identities, and the low reliability of compromised credential information, means attackers are compelled to prioritize — regardless of a target-rich surroundings of a whole lot of enterprise apps, creating 1000’s of sprawled identities per group, as a result of:
- Writing and operating customized python scripts for each single app (there are greater than 40k SaaS apps on the web) will not be lifelike. Even for those who did the highest 100 or 1000 that might be a big job and require fixed upkeep, whereas barely scratching the floor of the full alternative.
- Even when totally scripted and utilizing a botnet to distribute the assault and keep away from IP blocking, controls like fee limiting, CAPTCHA, and account lockouts can hinder mass credential stuffing in opposition to a single app. And a concentrated assault on a single web site goes to generate vital ranges of visitors if you wish to get by means of 15 billion passwords in an inexpensive timeframe, so it’s totally prone to increase the alarm.
So attackers have a tendency to focus on a smaller variety of apps, and solely search for a direct match by way of the credentials tried (e.g. the stolen credential should instantly belong to an account on the goal app). After they do go after one thing new, it tends to be focused on a selected app/platform (e.g. Snowflake) or on the lookout for a narrower subset of credentials (e.g. credentials clearly related to edge gadgets, for extra conventional community environments).
A missed alternative?
As we have established, the state of affairs relating to credential stuffing assaults is already fairly unhealthy regardless of these limitations. However issues might be considerably worse.
Password reuse means a single compromised account may flip into many
If attackers had been in a position to enhance the dimensions of their assaults to focus on a broader variety of apps (quite than concentrating on a shortlist of excessive worth apps) they may make the most of all-too-common password reuse. In accordance with a recent investigation of identity data, on common:
- 1 in 3 staff reuse passwords
- 9% of identities have a reused password AND no MFA
- 10% of IdP accounts (used for SSO) have a non-unique password
What does this imply? If a stolen credential is legitimate, there is a good likelihood that it may be used to entry multiple account, on multiple app (at the very least).
Image the situation: A latest compromised credential leak from infostealer infections or credential phishing campaigns reveals {that a} specific username and password mixture is legitimate on a selected app — to illustrate Microsoft 365. Now, this account is fairly locked down — not solely does it have MFA, however there are conditional entry insurance policies in place proscribing the IP/location it may be accessed from.
Often, that is the place the assault would finish, and also you’d flip your consideration to one thing else. However what for those who had been in a position to spray these credentials throughout each different enterprise app that the person has an account on?
Scaling credential assaults with Pc-Utilizing Brokers
Till now, the influence of AI on identification assaults has been restricted to the usage of LLMs for the creation of phishing emails, in AI-assisted malware improvement, and for social media bots — little question vital, however not precisely transformative, and requiring fixed human oversight and enter.
However with the launch of OpenAI Operator, a brand new form of “Pc-Utilizing Agent”, this might be about to vary.
Operator is skilled on a specialist dataset and carried out in its personal sandboxed browser, that means it is ready to carry out frequent net duties like a human — seeing and interacting with pages as a human would.
In contrast to different automated options, Operator requires no customized implementation or coding to have the ability to work together with new websites, making it a way more scalable choice for attackers trying to goal a broad sweep of web sites/apps.
Demo: Utilizing Operator to conduct credential stuffing assaults at-scale
Researchers at Push Security put the malicious use-cases of Operator to the check, utilizing it to:
- Establish which corporations have an current tenant on an inventory of apps
- Try to login to numerous app tenants with a offered username and password
Affect abstract
The outcomes had been fairly eye-opening. The operator clearly demonstrated the flexibility to focus on an inventory of apps with compromised credentials and carry out in-app actions. Now take into consideration this x10, x100, x10,000 … These usually are not advanced duties. However the worth of CUAs Operator will not be in tackling complexity, however scale. Think about a world the place you possibly can orchestrate Operator home windows through API and get it to execute these actions concurrently (performance that exists already for ChatGPT).
However that is greater than Operator — it is in regards to the course of the know-how. OpenAI might implement restrictions — higher in-app guardrails, fee limits on the variety of concurrent duties and complete utilization, and many others. However you possibly can assure it will not be the one CUA — it is solely a matter of time earlier than comparable merchandise emerge (possibly even inherently malicious ones) making use of the identical know-how.
Ultimate ideas
It is nonetheless early days for CUA tech, however there is a clear indication that an already extreme safety problem might be made worse with this specific type of AI-driven automation. Whereas the flexibility to focus on a broad set of apps has been beforehand past the scope of conventional automation, it is about to develop into rather more accessible to even low-skilled attackers (suppose: subsequent gen script kiddies?).
One other manner to consider it’s that it successfully offers a human attacker a fleet of low-level interns who do not fairly know what they’re doing, however will be instructed to carry out particular, itemised duties at scale with solely the occasional test in — when you work on different, extra advanced duties. So, a bit like a pink group supervisor of AI bots.
Operator signifies that attackers can leverage compromised credentials at-scale, make the most of the huge numbers of susceptible and misconfigured identities, and convert them into systemic breaches rather more simply. In a manner, it may make credential stuffing a bit extra prefer it was earlier than the shift to cloud apps — the place you could possibly spray 1000’s of credentials throughout your targets with no need customized improvement each time.
Fortunately, no new anti-AI capabilities are required — nevertheless it’s extra vital than ever that organizations look to defend their identification assault floor and discover and repair identification vulnerabilities earlier than attackers can make the most of them.
Discover out extra
If you wish to be taught extra about identification assaults and the right way to cease them, try Push Security — you possibly can book a demo or check out their browser-based platform totally free.
And if you wish to see them demo extra malicious use circumstances of Operator, check out this on-demand webinar.
