T1110.003SubTechniquecredential-accessagent-callable

T1110.003Password Spraying

Sub-technique of T1110

Platforms: Windows · Azure AD · Office 365 · SaaS · IaaS · Linux · macOS · Google Workspace · Containers

ATT&CK version: 14.1

What it is

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 default environments, LDAP and Kerberos connection attempts are less likely to trigger events over SMB, which creates Windows "logon failure" event ID 4625.

ATT&CK tactics· 1

Credential Access

References

  1. https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1110/003
  2. https://www.trimarcsecurity.com/single-post/2018/05/06/Trimarc-Research-Detecting-Password-Spraying-with-Security-Event-Auditing
  3. http://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/?p=4645
  4. https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA18-086A
Sourced from MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise v14.1. Curated and contextualized for EU compliance use cases by Adam Lundqvist, Founder at SQUR.