Brute Force: Credential Stuffing
- ID
- T1110.004
- Tactics
- TA0006 Credential Access
- Sub-technique of
- T1110 Brute Force
- Platforms
- Containers, ESXi, IaaS, Identity Provider, Linux, macOS, Network Devices, Office Suite, SaaS, Windows
- Data sources
- User Account Authentication
- Source
- attack.mitre.org
- MITRE last modified
- 12 May 2026
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.[4]
Detection
- DET0460 Credential Stuffing Detection via Reused Breached Credentials Across Services
Data components: User Account Authentication
Mitigations (4)
- M1018 User Account Management
Proactively reset accounts that are known to be part of breached credentials either immediately, or after detecting bruteforce attempts.
- M1027 Password Policies
Refer to NIST guidelines when creating password policies. [1]
- M1032 Multi-factor Authentication
Use multi-factor authentication. Where possible, also enable multi-factor authentication on externally facing services.
- 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]
Groups (2)
Software (1)
References
- NIST 800-63-3
- Microsoft Common Conditional Access Policies
- Okta Block Anonymizing Services
- US-CERT TA18-068A 2018