5 Rando Stats from Watching eCrime All Day Every Day
David Holmes here, cub reporter for Shape Security. While I’m luxuriating in United Airlines steerage class, our crack SOC team is back at HQ slaving away over their dashboards as tidal waves of automated traffic crash against the Shape breakers. At least they have Nespresso and those convenient eggs-in-a-bag from the kitch. The day shift of SOC team #1 actually sits pretty close to the corporate marketing brigade, so we kind of know each other and exchange awkward greetings in the hallway.
ANYWAY, I thought it would be cool to share some statistics from SOC’s recent cases that highlight the shape of the anti-automation industry today.
1. 750 Million in a Week for One Site
Since the release of the Collection #1 credential corpus, some of our customers are experiencing insane levels of login events. One customer saw over 1.5 billion automation attempts in a two-week period. That’s pretty high even for them, one of the largest banks in the solar system. If, for some tragic reason, the Collection #1 campaign persists at its current level, you could extrapolate 39 billion automation attempts in a year (assuming no cracker vacation). Against a single site. That’s sick, brah. Sick.
2. IP Address Re-use: 2.2
This stat is actually sadder than last week’s Grammys. During a credential-stuffing campaign, the attacker throws millions of credentials (gathered from breaches or the “dark web”). If he tried them all from a single IP address, then, of course, you’d just block that IP address, right? So he uses multiple IP addresses. In extreme cases, the most sophisticated cracker will only try a single login from each IP address (no re-use). Lately, the average number of times an IP address will get reused during a campaign is a paltry 2.2.
Basically, blocking by IP address is useless. By the time you add an IP address to your blacklist, it’s too late—it’s not going to be reused again during the campaign. If you see a vendor touting address-blocking, or CAPTCHAs, as a solution, please put your hands on your hips, throw back your head, and issue forth the biggest belly laugh you can. Bwahahaha!
Sadly, some of the technical people we talk to just don’t get it. We tell them: “Blacklists are useless,” and they say “Sure, but you block by IP address, right?” Then we explain it again, and they still don’t get it. Someone should write a paper! Oh, wait, that’s us.
3. Credential Stuffing Succeeds 2% of the Time
2% is funny. It’s our favorite milk. It’s the conversion from US dollars to Philippine pesos. It’s our reader-retention rate when we let Holmes write. Two percent may not sound like much, but consider an attacker testing a million stolen credentials against your web property. That’s 20,000 valid usernames and passwords he’s going to confirm. Actually, the success rate varies between 0.1 and three percent, but two percent is good enough for government work. And speaking of government…
You might be thinking: Actually, guys, 0.1 to 3.0 is a huge range. That’s a multiple of 30. An order of magnitude and then some.” True enough, but when dealing with a million—or even a billion—credentials, the difference is really just “bad outcome” versus “really bad outcome.”
Yesterday Shape looked at a small campaign where a single, lonely attacker in Vietnam had 1,500,000 credentials. Even a 0.1-percent success rate, for him, would have translated to the confirmation, and possible account takeover (ATO), of 1,500 accounts. We say “would have” because we foiled all of his posts. He didn’t even seem to notice, which makes us think maybe he’s TOO automated, or that he suffers from some kind of “educational gap” (that’s the new euphemism for stupidity).
4. 15 Months to an Ugly Baby
The number of months between when some dood stole all your credentials and when you read about it in The Register while eating your precious Honey Smacks is: 15. A lot can happen in 15 months; French words, mostly. Organization penetration, exfiltration, hacker celebration, hacker inebriation, and stock deprecation. Of course 15 months is just an average, and individual cases vary widely, but the point is that it’s an eternity in Internet time.
“Well, dang!” you sputter around your Honey Smacks. “What’s being done about this???”
We’ve got a solution we call Blackfish. We’re already seeing all the waves of credential stuffing against the busiest commercial sites in the world. So we can tell when someone stuffs, say, the creds from your entire customer login database against HoneySmacks.com. Now you don’t have to wait 15 months; if you had Blackfish, you’d know the minute someone tried your logins. How cool is that? If you’re interested, a single chat with our trusty sales chatbot can get the ball rolling for you.
And if you want to read a much more coherent explanation of the 15-month effect, print out our award-winning Credential Spill report, and read it over your Honey Smacks tomorrow.
Disclaimer: Shape Security in no way endorses Honey Smacks; in fact, they have been voted the number #2 worst breakfast you can possibly eat. But dang, they are yums.
5. 99.5% of POSTs are against “forgot-password.js”
Our SOC team dealt with an ATO campaign last month. We remember it well because against that website, we detected that 99.5 percent of requests headed for their “forgot-password” page were automated. Yes, that’s 199/200 for the fractionally-minded (aren’t numbers fun)!
Sure, that’s a single campaign, but in our experience, it’s not an uncommon one. Check your own weblogs and see how the access requests to your forgot-password page compare to, well, anything else (and then call us).
We have many customers for whom forgot-password is their most-frequented page by far. By far! And if our customers weren’t the paragons of morality that they are, they’d put ads on that page and fund themselves a couple of truckloads of egg-in-a-bags. Or is it eggs-in-a-bags? The Oxford dictionary is strangely silent on this topic.
Well, there you have it: five random statistics about fighting anti-automation we slapped together compiled from the last month. Stay tuned, friends, and we at Shape Security’s marketing brigade will bring you more pseudo-cogent security-related statistics, probably from RSA 2019, in a couple of weeks.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Shape Security Blog authored by David Holmes. Read the original post at: https://blog.shapesecurity.com/2019/02/19/5-rando-stats-from-watching-ecrime-all-day-every-day/
