Query: EDR alert: possible Password Spraying (T1110.003)
Matching passage: T1110.003 Password Spraying. Tactics: credential access. Description: Adversaries may use a single or small list of commonly used passwords against many different accounts to attempt to acquire valid account credentials. Password spraying uses one password (e.g. 'Password01'), or a small list of commonly used passwords, that may match the complexity policy of the domain. Logins are attempted with that password against many different accounts on a network to avoid account lockouts that would normally occur when brute forcing a single account with many passwords. (Citation: BlackHillsInfosec Password Spraying) Typically, management services over commonly used ports are used when password spraying. 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.(Citation: US-CERT TA18-068A 2018) In order to avoid detection thresholds, adversaries may deliberately throttle password spraying attempts to avoid triggering security alerting. Additionally, adversaries may leverage LDAP and Kerberos authentication attempts, which are less likely to trigger high-visibility events such as Windows "logon failure" event ID 4625 that is commonly triggered by failed SMB connection attempts.(Citation: Microsoft Storm-0940)
Near-miss passage: T1110 Brute Force. Tactics: credential access. Description: Adversaries may use brute force techniques to gain access to accounts when passwords are unknown or when password hashes are obtained.(Citation: TrendMicro Pawn Storm Dec 2020) Without knowledge of the password for an account or set of accounts, an adversary may systematically guess the password using a repetitive or iterative mechanism.(Citation: Dragos Crashoverride 2018) Brute forcing passwords can take place via interaction with a service that will check the validity of those credentials or offline against previously acquired credential data, such as password hashes. Brute forcing credentials may take place at various points during a breach. For example, adversaries may attempt to brute force access to [Valid Accounts](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1078) within a victim environment leveraging knowledge gathered from other post-compromise behaviors such as [OS Credential Dumping](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1003), [Account Discovery](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1087), or [Password Policy Discovery](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1201). Adversaries may also combine brute forcing activity with behaviors such as [External Remote Services](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1133) as part of Initial Access. If an adversary guesses the correct password but fails to login to a compromised account due to location-based conditional access policies, they may change their infrastructure until they match the victim’s location and therefore bypass those policies.(Citation: ReliaQuest Health Care Social Engineering Campaign 2024)