Credential stuffing assaults had a huge effect in 2024, fueled by a vicious circle of infostealer infections and data breaches. However issues could possibly be about to worsen nonetheless with Laptop-Utilizing Brokers, a brand new form of AI agent that permits low-cost, low-effort automation of frequent net duties — together with these incessantly carried out by attackers.
Stolen credentials: The cyber felony’s weapon of selection in 2024
Stolen credentials have been the #1 attacker motion in 2023/24, and the breach vector for 80% of net app assaults. Not shocking 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 felony boards.
The felony 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 data breach dumps and compromised credential feeds from infostealer and mass phishing campaigns, ensuing within the compromise of 165 buyer tenants and tons of of hundreds of thousands of breached data.
However regardless of 2024 being an unprecedented yr when it comes to the influence of identity-based assaults, there’s nonetheless plenty 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. Nevertheless it’s not fairly as simple to routinely spray credentials throughout techniques because it as soon as was.
No extra one-size-fits-all
Quite than a single centralized community with apps and information contained inside an infrastructure perimeter, enterprise IT is now shaped of tons of of web-based apps and platforms, creating 1000’s of identities per group.
Because of this identities too are actually decentralized and distributed all around the web, versus being saved solely in identification techniques like Lively Listing, and carried out utilizing frequent protocols and mechanisms.
Whereas HTTP(S) is normal, fashionable net apps are complicated and extremely personalized, with a graphically-driven interface that’s totally different each time. And to make issues worse, fashionable net apps are particularly designed to forestall malicious automation via bot protections like CAPTCHA.
So quite than encountering normal protocols and having the ability to write a single set of instruments to make use of throughout any group/atmosphere 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 so on.) in your password sprayer — customized device growth 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 accessible on the general public web, not together with these discovered solely in non-public channels/feeds. This listing is rising all the time — like 244M never-before-seen passwords and 493M distinctive web site and electronic 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 current overview of TI information by Push Safety 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 have 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 pressured to prioritize
The distributed nature of apps and identities, and the low reliability of compromised credential information, means attackers are pressured to prioritize — regardless of a target-rich atmosphere of tons of of enterprise apps, creating 1000’s of sprawled identities per group, as a result of:
- Writing and working customized python scripts for each single app (there are greater than 40k SaaS apps on the web) shouldn’t be lifelike. Even in the event you did the highest 100 or 1000 that may be a big activity 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 price limiting, CAPTCHA, and account lockouts can impede mass credential stuffing in opposition to a single app. And a concentrated assault on a single website goes to generate vital ranges of site visitors if you wish to get via 15 billion passwords in an inexpensive timeframe, so it’s totally more likely to increase the alarm.
So attackers have a tendency to focus on a smaller variety of apps, and solely search for a direct match when it comes to the credentials tried (e.g. the stolen credential should immediately belong to an account on the goal app). Once they do go after one thing new, it tends to be targeting a selected app/platform (e.g. Snowflake) or in search of a narrower subset of credentials (e.g. credentials clearly related to edge units, for extra conventional community environments).
A missed alternative?
As we have established, the scenario relating to credential stuffing assaults is already fairly dangerous regardless of these limitations. However issues could possibly be considerably worse.
Password reuse means a single compromised account might flip into many
If attackers have been in a position to enhance the size of their assaults to focus on a broader variety of apps (quite than concentrating on a shortlist of excessive worth apps) they might benefit from all-too-common password reuse. In keeping with a current investigation of identification information, 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 probability that it may be used to entry a couple of account, on a couple of app (no less than).
Image the situation: A current compromised credential leak from infostealer infections or credential phishing campaigns exhibits {that a} explicit 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 limiting the IP/location it may be accessed from.
Normally, that is the place the assault would finish, and also you’d flip your consideration to one thing else. However what in the event you have been in a position to spray these credentials throughout each different enterprise app that the person has an account on?
Scaling credential assaults with Laptop-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 growth, and for social media bots — little doubt vital, however not precisely transformative, and requiring fixed human oversight and enter.
However with the launch of OpenAI Operator, a brand new form of “Laptop-Utilizing Agent”, this could possibly be about to alter.
Operator is skilled on a specialist dataset and carried out in its personal sandboxed browser, which means it is ready to carry out frequent net duties like a human — seeing and interacting with pages as a human would.
Not like 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 seeking to goal a broad sweep of websites/apps.
Demo: Utilizing Operator to conduct credential stuffing assaults at-scale
Researchers at Push Safety put the malicious use-cases of Operator to the check, utilizing it to:
- Establish which firms have an current tenant on a listing of apps
- Try to login to numerous app tenants with a supplied username and password
Influence abstract
The outcomes have been fairly eye-opening. The operator clearly demonstrated the power to focus on a listing of apps with compromised credentials and carry out in-app actions. Now take into consideration this x10, x100, x10,000 … These aren’t complicated duties. However the worth of CUAs Operator shouldn’t be in tackling complexity, however scale. Think about a world the place you may orchestrate Operator home windows by way of 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 route of the know-how. OpenAI might implement restrictions — higher in-app guardrails, price limits on the variety of concurrent duties and whole utilization, and so on. However you may assure it will not be the one CUA — it is solely a matter of time earlier than comparable merchandise emerge (perhaps even inherently malicious ones) making use of the identical know-how.
Last ideas
It is nonetheless early days for CUA tech, however there is a clear indication that an already extreme security problem could possibly be made worse with this explicit type of AI-driven automation. Whereas the power to focus on a broad set of apps has been beforehand past the scope of conventional automation, it is about to turn into far more accessible to even low-skilled attackers (suppose: subsequent gen script kiddies?).
One other manner to consider it’s that it successfully provides a human attacker a fleet of low-level interns who do not fairly know what they’re doing, however may be instructed to carry out particular, itemised duties at scale with solely the occasional test in — when you work on different, extra complicated duties. So, a bit like a pink staff supervisor of AI bots.
Operator implies that attackers can leverage compromised credentials at-scale, benefit from the huge numbers of susceptible and misconfigured identities, and convert them into systemic breaches far more simply. In a manner, it might make credential stuffing a bit extra prefer it was earlier than the shift to cloud apps — the place you possibly can spray 1000’s of credentials throughout your targets with no need customized growth each time.
Fortunately, no new anti-AI capabilities are required — nevertheless it’s extra necessary than ever that organizations look to defend their identification assault floor and discover and repair identification vulnerabilities earlier than attackers can benefit from them.
Discover out extra
If you wish to study extra about identification assaults and the right way to cease them, try Push Safety — you may e book a demo or check out their browser-based platform at no cost.
And if you wish to see them demo extra malicious use circumstances of Operator, try this on-demand webinar.
