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T1110.004 Credential Stuffing

Adversaries may use credentials obtained from breach dumps of unrelated accounts to gain access to target accounts through credential overlap. Occasionally, large numbers of username and password pairs are dumped online when a website or service is compromised and the user account credentials accessed. The information may be useful to an adversary attempting to compromise accounts by taking advantage of the tendency for users to use the same passwords across personal and business accounts.

Credential stuffing is a risky option because it could cause numerous authentication failures and account lockouts, depending on the organization’s login failure policies.

Typically, management services over commonly used ports are used when stuffing credentials. 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 365.1

Item Value
ID T1110.004
Sub-techniques T1110.001, T1110.002, T1110.003, T1110.004
Tactics TA0006
Platforms Containers, ESXi, IaaS, Identity Provider, Linux, Network Devices, Office Suite, SaaS, Windows, macOS
Version 1.7
Created 11 February 2020
Last Modified 24 October 2025

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
G0114 Chimera Chimera has used credential stuffing against victim’s remote services to obtain valid accounts.7
S0266 TrickBot TrickBot uses brute-force attack against RDP with rdpscanDll module.56

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1036 Account Use Policies Set account lockout policies after a certain number of failed login attempts to prevent passwords from being guessed. Too strict a policy may create a denial of service condition and render environments un-usable, with all accounts used in the brute force being locked-out. Use conditional access policies to block logins from non-compliant devices or from outside defined organization IP ranges.2 Consider blocking risky authentication requests, such as those originating from anonymizing services/proxies.3
M1032 Multi-factor Authentication Use multi-factor authentication. Where possible, also enable multi-factor authentication on externally facing services.
M1027 Password Policies Refer to NIST guidelines when creating password policies. 4
M1018 User Account Management Proactively reset accounts that are known to be part of breached credentials either immediately, or after detecting bruteforce attempts.

References

  1. US-CERT. (2018, March 27). TA18-068A Brute Force Attacks Conducted by Cyber Actors. Retrieved October 2, 2019. ↩

  2. Microsoft. (2022, December 14). Conditional Access templates. Retrieved February 21, 2023. ↩

  3. Moussa Diallo and Brett Winterford. (2024, April 26). How to Block Anonymizing Services using Okta. Retrieved May 28, 2024. ↩

  4. Grassi, P., et al. (2017, December 1). SP 800-63-3, Digital Identity Guidelines. Retrieved January 16, 2019. ↩

  5. Boutin, J. (2020, October 12). ESET takes part in global operation to disrupt Trickbot. Retrieved March 15, 2021. ↩

  6. Tudorica, R., Maximciuc, A., Vatamanu, C. (2020, March 18). New TrickBot Module Bruteforces RDP Connections, Targets Select Telecommunication Services in US and Hong Kong. Retrieved March 15, 2021. ↩

  7. Jansen, W . (2021, January 12). Abusing cloud services to fly under the radar. Retrieved September 12, 2024. ↩