Credential stuffing assaults had a big impact in 2024, fueled by a vicious circle of infostealer infections and knowledge breaches. However issues might be about to worsen nonetheless with Laptop-Utilizing Brokers, a brand new sort of AI agent that permits low-cost, low-effort automation of widespread net duties — together with these often carried out by attackers.
Stolen credentials: The cyber prison’s weapon of alternative in 2024
Stolen credentials have been the #1 attacker motion 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 decide up the most recent drop for as little as $10 on prison boards.
The prison 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 knowledge breach dumps and compromised credential feeds from infostealer and mass phishing campaigns, ensuing within the compromise of 165 buyer tenants and a whole bunch 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 comprehend.
Credential assault automation — what’s modified with the shift to SaaS?
Brute forcing and credential stuffing are nothing new, and have been a key part of the cyber attacker toolkit for many years. But it surely’s not fairly as simple to mechanically spray credentials throughout programs because it as soon as was.
No extra one-size-fits-all
Somewhat than a single centralized community with apps and knowledge contained inside an infrastructure perimeter, enterprise IT is now shaped of a whole bunch of web-based apps and platforms, creating 1000’s of identities per group.
Because of this identities too are actually decentralized and distributed everywhere in the web, versus being saved solely in identification programs like Lively Listing, and carried out utilizing widespread 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 forestall malicious automation by means of bot protections like CAPTCHA.
So fairly 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 the whole web, write a single script per service (e.g. FTP, SSH, Telnet, and so forth.) 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 accessible on the general public web, not together with these discovered solely in non-public channels/feeds. This record is rising the entire 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, but it surely’s tough for attackers to harness this knowledge. The overwhelming majority of those credentials are previous and invalid. A current evaluate of TI knowledge by Push Safety researchers discovered that fewer than 1% of stolen credentials included in risk intelligence feeds from a multi-vendor knowledge 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 relationship 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 knowledge, means attackers are compelled to prioritize — regardless of a target-rich surroundings of a whole bunch 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) is just not reasonable. Even in the event you did the highest 100 or 1000 that may be a major job and require fixed upkeep, whereas barely scratching the floor of the full alternative.
- Even when absolutely scripted and utilizing a botnet to distribute the assault and keep away from IP blocking, controls like price limiting, CAPTCHA, and account lockouts can hinder mass credential stuffing in opposition to a single app. And a concentrated assault on a single website goes to generate important ranges of site visitors if you wish to get by means of 15 billion passwords in an affordable timeframe, so it’s extremely 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 straight belong to an account on the goal app). Once they do go after one thing new, it tends to be focused on a particular app/platform (e.g. Snowflake) or in search of 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 concerning credential stuffing assaults is already fairly unhealthy regardless of these limitations. However issues might be considerably worse.
Password reuse means a single compromised account might flip into many
If attackers have been capable of improve the size of their assaults to focus on a broader variety of apps (fairly than concentrating on a shortlist of excessive worth apps) they may benefit from all-too-common password reuse. In line with a current investigation of identification knowledge, 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 (at the least).
Image the situation: A current compromised credential leak from infostealer infections or credential phishing campaigns exhibits {that a} specific username and password mixture is legitimate on a particular app — as an instance 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 in the event you have been capable of spray these credentials throughout each different enterprise app that the consumer 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 improvement, and for social media bots — little doubt important, however not precisely transformative, and requiring fixed human oversight and enter.
However with the launch of OpenAI Operator, a brand new sort of “Laptop-Utilizing Agent”, this might be about to vary.
Operator is educated on a specialist dataset and carried out in its personal sandboxed browser, which means it is ready to carry out widespread 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 possibility 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 Safety put the malicious use-cases of Operator to the check, utilizing it to:
- Determine which firms have an present tenant on an inventory of apps
- Try and login to numerous app tenants with a offered username and password
Influence abstract
The outcomes have 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 should not advanced duties. However the worth of CUAs Operator is just not in tackling complexity, however scale. Think about a world the place you possibly can 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 larger than Operator — it is in regards to the route of the know-how. OpenAI could implement restrictions — higher in-app guardrails, price limits on the variety of concurrent duties and whole utilization, and so forth. 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.
Closing 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 turn out to be way more accessible to even low-skilled attackers (assume: subsequent gen script kiddies?).
One other means 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 — whilst you work on different, extra advanced duties. So, a bit like a crimson crew supervisor of AI bots.
Operator signifies that attackers can leverage compromised credentials at-scale, benefit from the huge numbers of susceptible and misconfigured identities, and convert them into systemic breaches way more simply. In a means, it might make credential stuffing a bit extra prefer it was earlier than the shift to cloud apps — the place you might spray 1000’s of credentials throughout your targets while not having customized improvement each time.
Fortunately, no new anti-AI capabilities are required — but it surely’s extra essential 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 methods to cease them, take a look at Push Safety — you possibly can e-book a demo or check out their browser-based platform totally free.
And if you wish to see them demo extra malicious use instances of Operator, take a look at this on-demand webinar.