In February, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about a novel cybercrime service that helped attackers intercept the one-time passwords (OTPs) that many websites require as a second authentication factor in addition to passwords. That service quickly went offline, but new research reveals a number of competitors have since launched bot-based services that make it relatively easy for crooks to phish OTPs from targets.
But in so many instances, what sites request is basically two things you know (a password and a one-time code) to be submitted through the same channel (a web browser). This is usually still better than no multi-factor authentication at all, but as these services show there are now plenty of options of circumventing this protection.
Bad Bots Rise Password
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Hi,If you get one of these social engineering phone calls, in addition to immediately hanging up, start the process of changing all your passwords. Passwords should be unique, random strings of all possible character sets, and 24 characters or more or as long as the host allows. This is to thwart rainbow table hacks.
Bot attacks are a significant security issue for online businesses. Especially with the rise of consumers interacting with businesses online, protecting customer accounts against bad actors is more critical for long-term retention and customer loyalty than ever before.
However, eliminating the password does not mean that the password is simply hidden for the customer behind a FaceID, one-time password, push notification, or magic link. To deliver full protection against brute force attacks, credential stuffing, and account takeover fraud, passwordless solutions must eliminate the password from the customer experience and the database so that it is never used for authentication nor recovery.
Jailbroken or rooted devices leave customers open to the risk of unwittingly providing malicious bots access to their accounts. Mitigating malware vulnerabilities associated with rooted devices requires some level of visibility into the security posture of the endpoint device prior to login and the ability to make risk-based decisions in response.
In 2009, Rockyou was hacked. The attackers found and stole 32 million cleartext user accounts. A subsequently exposed list of 14,341,564 passwords became the original rockyou.txt widely used in dictionary attacks and included with Kali Linux to aid penetration testing.
Over the following years additional password lists have been added to the original, culminating in the rockyou2021.txt collection now comprising about 8.4 billion passwords in a 92 GB text file. This is freely available on GitHub.
But rockyou2021 is effectively just a massive word list. It does not include random, mixed ASCII and special character strings. While it includes something like 8.4 billion strings, a complete list of all possible ASCII seven-character strings would comprise around 70 trillion possibilities (95^7). This would rise dramatically with any increase in the password length.
But the primary takeaway from this Rapid7 research is that if companies and people can condition themselves to generate passwords of sufficient length (Beardsley uses 14 characters) containing a few special characters, there is a strong likelihood that the current generation of automated opportunistic attacks against RDP and SSH will be defeated.
Aside from noisy good or known bots, there are still bad bots whose operators may have different motivations this year. As noted earlier, inventory hoarding may not be as profitable as it was last year as the retail tides have turned. Instead, scraper bots may account for a bigger slice of overall volume.
By diving deeper into our commerce data, Akamai also observed interesting bot trends against our global travel and hospitality subvertical. Starting in the summer of 2021, malicious bot activity steadily began to increase and peaked in October 2021. The rise in bot traffic aligned with consumers trying to book hotel and airline reservations ahead of November and December holiday travel. Then, moving into 2022, bot traffic began to steadily increase up 54% YTD (Figure 2). This 10-month consistent rise in overall bot volume was most likely driven by known (good) bots, like travel aggregator sites, doing price and inventory scraping as consumers began opening their wallets to make post-pandemic vacation and travel plans.
Get more refined in your good bot strategy. Define which good bots you want to allow and which you want to slow down or block. For example, you might want to allow bots from the top three coupon vendors to come through but to block all the others. Or maybe you want to only allow partner bots during off-hours but to restrict them during peak times for human consumers. At the end of the day, not all bots are equally valuable to your business, so consider slowing down or blocking the less attractive ones while allowing the revenue-enhancing ones to pass through unhindered.
Continue to keep WAF rules updated and in deny mode to defend against zero-day exploits, malware, and more. For many organizations, the WAF serves as the first line of defense to keep web applications protected and performing in an optimal manner. When the Log4j vulnerability was initially disclosed in December 2021, Akamai observed that approximately 58% of all exploitation attempts were made against the commerce vertical. Attackers seemed eager to take advantage of the seasonal frenzy when enterprise defenders and security resources were already stretched thin. As many organizations were left scrambling to identify vulnerable systems, malicious Log4j attempts made via web application traffic were stopped through updated Akamai WAF rules to help customers buy critical time to patch affected infrastructure or remediate infected assets.
Bad bots scrape data from sites without permission in order to reuse it (e.g., pricing, inventory levels) and gain a competitive edge. The truly nefarious ones undertake criminal activities, such as fraud and outright theft.
Click here to access our Bad Bot Report 2019 and learn more about bad bots landscape in 2019, and how to protect yourself from malicious bots. If you suspect bad bot abuses you should always turn to experts like GlobalDots to quickly turn the tables.
And although the rise in such attacks may seem to be the bigger problem, the main issue that we need to conquer is the lack of awareness and understanding of these bot attacks and the possible ways to mitigate them.
Strong passwords are crucial to maintaining security and privacy for your sensitive data. Ensure that your employees use strong passwords and a secure password manager to help maintain password hygiene.
Admittedly bad bots mostly attack websites; however, that does not mean you can overlook every other access point. Various exposed APIs, mobile networks, or apps can prove to be the gateway for a mean bot attack.
It is due to these malicious bots that bot traffic gets a bad reputation, and rightly so. Unfortunately, a significant amount of bad bots populate the internet nowadays. In fact, it is estimated that traffic from malicious bots will account for 27.7% of internet traffic in 2022.
Next to this, malicious bot traffic strains your web server and might sometimes overload it. These bots take up your server bandwidth with their requests, making your website slow or utterly inaccessible in case of a DDoS attack. In the meantime, you might have lost traffic and sales to other competitors.
When a bot visits your site, it makes an HTTP request to your server asking for information. Your server needs to respond to this request and returns the necessary information. Whenever this happens, your server must spend a small amount of energy to complete the request. But if you consider all the bots on the internet, then the amount of energy spent on bot traffic is enormous.
Understanding what makes a password insecure is the first step toward creating better password hygiene. Establishing strong password security not only keeps your data safe but also helps you stay compliant with frameworks like SOC 2 and PCI DSS.
While most people know that password reuse is a bad security practice, many do it anyway. Take a look at these weak password statistics and password reuse statistics to find out how poor password behaviors could put your data at risk.
34. Even after experiencing a data breach such as a man-in-the-middle attack or phishing attack, only 53% of IT security professionals say their organizations changed how passwords or protected corporate accounts were managed. (Yubico and Ponemon Institute)
If your organization complies with security frameworks like SOC 2, there are specific password requirements that can help you improve overall password security. For example, SOC 2 requires businesses to demonstrate how they track and manage credentials. A password manager is one way to adhere to this requirement. They not only help employees keep track of their passwords but also allow administrators to add and remove access to certain logins.
2FA is a password feature that adds an additional layer to your login procedure by asking you to verify your identity in a second manner. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) requires a user to provide two or more verification factors to log into an account.
You can also securely share credentials with other employees and monitor who has access to certain credentials. When you need to offboard an employee, you can easily retract their access within the password manager.
This same method of using guessed or stolen passwords kicked off several large-scale supply chain and critical infrastructure attacks that dominated the news in 2021. JBS, Colonial Pipeline, Solarwinds and two U.S. water treatment plants all used employee credentials to take over accounts and inflict extensive damage. The most infamous password: Solarwinds123.
There are several ways to authenticate users without having to use passwords. Most of us are familiar with security keys that IT administrators use to access workstations and privileged accounts. The problem is hardware tokens are costly to provision, lack scalability and can be lost. They were designed for the workforce, not consumers. 2ff7e9595c
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