CAPEC-560: Use of Known Domain Credentials

MITRE CAPEC attack pattern

Description

An adversary guesses or obtains (i.e. steals or purchases) legitimate credentials (e.g. userID/password) to achieve authentication and to perform authorized actions under the guise of an authenticated user or service.

Where this sits in the chain

A finding maps to a weakness (CWE), a weakness is exploited by an attack pattern (CAPEC), and an attack pattern shows up in ATT&CK as observed adversary behaviour. This page is the middle hop.

Weaknesses exploited: CWE-262, CWE-263, CWE-307, CWE-308, CWE-309, CWE-522, CWE-654, CWE-1273

ATT&CK techniques: T1078

Prerequisites

• The system/application uses one factor password based authentication, SSO, and/or cloud-based authentication.
• The system/application does not have a sound password policy that is being enforced.
• The system/application does not implement an effective password throttling mechanism.
• The adversary possesses a list of known user accounts and corresponding passwords that may exist on the target.

Skills required

• Low: Once an adversary obtains a known credential, leveraging it is trivial.

Consequences

• Confidentiality, Access Control, Authentication: Gain Privileges
• Confidentiality, Authorization: Read Data
• Integrity: Modify Data

Mitigations

• Leverage multi-factor authentication for all authentication services and prior to granting an entity access to the domain network.
• Create a strong password policy and ensure that your system enforces this policy.
• Ensure users are not reusing username/password combinations for multiple systems, applications, or services.
• Do not reuse local administrator account credentials across systems.
• Deny remote use of local admin credentials to log into domain systems.
• Do not allow accounts to be a local administrator on more than one system.
• Implement an intelligent password throttling mechanism. Care must be taken to assure that these mechanisms do not excessively enable account lockout attacks such as CAPEC-2.
• Monitor system and domain logs for abnormal credential access.

Source

• MITRE CAPEC CAPEC-560