Web sites invariably have defenses that will detect repeated login attempts from the same IP address, or multiple failed attempts at the same account - and simply block them. Simple brute force testing to discover where spilled passwords may have been reused is easily defeated. “The sheer scale of the credential theft and also the prevalence of Yahoo users’ accounts suggests that these stolen credentials have been benefiting cybercriminals over the past few years,” suggests the Shape report ( PDF). Occurrences like this mean that criminals have vast troves of legitimate user credentials - and user password recycling means that many will have been used on other accounts. The thefts took place in 20, giving the criminals up to four years to crack weak protection.

A total of 1.5 billion credentials were spilled to the Internet, protected by the weak MD5 hashing algorithm. This means that if criminals can crack stolen passwords from one account, they have legitimate credentials that have quite likely been used on other accounts.Ĭonsider the two Yahoo breaches reported in 2016. It is made possible because of the tendency for users to recycle their passwords for multiple accounts. Credential stuffing is the large scale use of automated means to test stolen passwords against other unrelated websites. Credential spilling is when those credentials are made available to other criminals. The ID is most commonly the user’s email address. In 2016, 3.3 billion user credentials were spilled onto the internet, according to figures from Shape Security’s just released 2017 Credential Spill Report.Ĭredential theft occurs when attackers breach a system and steal users’ access credentials - usually ID and password.

With a database of 1 million stolen credentials, criminals using a credential stuffing attack with a tool such as Sentry MBA could expect to compromise roughly 10,000 accounts on a targeted but uncompromised site.

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