T1110 Brute Force

This diagnostic statement implements security controls and restrictions for remote user access to systems. Remote user access control involves managing and securing how users remotely access systems, such as through encrypted connections and account use policies, which help prevent adversary access.

This diagnostic statement protects against Brute Force through the use of privileged account management and the use of multi-factor authentication.

This diagnostic statement provides protection from Brute Force through the implementation of authentication controls and privileged account management controls to limit credential access. Employing limitations to specific accounts, access control mechanisms, and auditing the attribution logs provides protection against adversaries attempting to brute force credentials.

This diagnostic statement protects against Brute Force through the use of revocation of keys and key management. Employing limitations to specific accounts along with access control mechanisms provides protection against adversaries attempting to brute force credentials.

This diagnostic statement describes how the organization ensures users are identified and authenticated before accessing systems, applications, and hardware, with logical access controls permitting access only to authorized individuals with legitimate business needs. Logical access controls in relation to systems can refer to the use of MFA, user account management, and other role-based access control mechanisms to enforce policies for authentication and authorization of user accounts.

This diagnostic statement describes how the organization implement appropriate authentication requirements, including selecting mechanisms based on risk, utilizing multi-factor authentication where necessary, and safeguarding the storage of authenticators like pins and passwords to protect sensitive access credentials.

This diagnostic statement includes implementation of controls for third-party access to an organization’s systems. Enforcing third-party account use policies to include account lockout policies after a certain number of failed login attempts mitigates the risk of brute-force attacks.

This diagnostic statement protects against Brute Force through the use of hardened access control policies, secure defaults, password complexity requirements, multifactor authentication requirements, and removal of terminated accounts.

CVE-2020-1472 is a privilege elevation vulnerability. The immediate effect of successful exploitation results in the ability to authentication to the vulnerable Domain Controller with Domain Administrator level credentials. In compromises exploiting this vulnerability, exploitation was typically followed immediately by dumping all hashes for Domain accounts.

CVE-2020-0688 is a RCE vulnerability exists in Microsoft Exchange software when the software fails to properly handle objects in memory. A nation-state APT actor has been observed exploiting this vulnerability to conduct widespread, distributed, and anonymized brute force access attempts against hundreds of government and private sector targets worldwide.

This control includes partial detection coverage for most of this technique's sub-techniques on a periodic basis.

This control covers the majority of sub-techniques for this parent technique and may cover both successful and unsuccessful brute force attacks. This control only provides alerts for a set of Azure database offerings. Databases that have been deployed to endpoints within Azure or third-party databases deployed to Azure do not generate alerts for this control.

This control's "Authentication to Linux machines should require SSH keys" recommendation can lead to obviating SSH Brute Force password attacks. Because this is specific to Linux, the coverage score is Minimal leading to an overall Minimal score.

This control can identify multiple connection attempts by external IPs, which may be indicative of Brute Force attempts, though not T1110.002, which is performed offline. It provides significant detection from most of this technique's sub-techniques and procedure examples resulting in an overall score of Significant.

This control provides partial coverage for most of this technique's sub-techniques and procedures.

This control provides detection for some of this technique's sub-techniques and procedure examples resulting in a Partial Coverage score and consequently an overall score of Partial.

This control can protect against brute force attacks.

This control can detect attempted or successful brute force attacks.

This control can be configured to completely block inbound access to selected ports until access is requested. This prevents any attempt at brute forcing a protocol, such as RDP or SSH, unless the attacker has the credentials and permissions to request such access. Even if permission has been granted to an authorized user to access the virtual machine, a list of authorized IP addresses for that access can be configured.

Advanced Protection Program enables the use of a security key for multi-factor authentication. This provides significant protection against Brute Force techniques attempting to gain access to accounts.

Cloud Endpoints allows administrators to set up login challenges, where a user attempting to access an API might be prompted to complete an additional verification step (like entering a code sent to their phone or answering a security question) before being granted access.

This control may mitigate brute force attacks by enforcing multi-factor authentication, enforcing strong password policies, and rotating credentials periodically. These recommendations are IAM best practices but must be explicitly implemented by a cloud administrator.

Often used by adversaries to gain access to a system, Palo Alto Network's vulnerability signature is able to detect multiple repetitive occurrences of a condition in a particular time that could indicate a brute force attack (e.g., failed logins). Although there are ways an attacker could brute force a system while avoiding detection, this technique was scored as significant based on Palo Alto Network's advanced threat detection technology which constantly updates to detect against the latest known variations of these attacks.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) methods, such as SMS, can also be used to help protect user accounts from phishing attacks. MFA provides significant protection against password compromises, requiring the adversary to complete an additional authentication method before their access is permitted.

SCC uses syslog to detect successful brute force attacks [via SSH] on a host. Because of the near-real time temporal factor when detecting cyber-attacks this control was graded as significant.

Amazon Cognito's MFA capability provides significant protection against password compromises, requiring the adversary to complete an additional authentication method before their access is permitted.

Finding types such as UnauthorizedAccess:EC2/RDPBruteForce, UnauthorizedAccess:EC2/SSHBruteForce, Impact:EC2/WinRMBruteForce, and Stealth:IAMUser/PasswordPolicyChange can detect when an EC2 instance may be involved in a brute force attack aimed at obtaining passwords. Due to the detection being limited to a specific set of application protocols, its coverage is Minimal resulting in a Minimal score.

The Amazon Inspector Best Practices assessment package can detect security control settings related to authentication and password policies on Linux endpoints. Specific security controls it can assess include "Disable password authentication over SSH", "Configure password maximum age", "Configure password minimum length", and "Configure password complexity" all of which impact the ability to brute force a password. This information can be used identify insecure configurations and harden the endpoints. Amazon Inspector does not directly protect against brute force attacks. Given Amazon Inspector can only assess these security controls on Linux platforms (although it also supports Windows), the coverage score is Minimal leading to an overall Minimal score.

This control provides significant coverage for all of this technique's sub-techniques, resulting in an overall score of Significant.

AWS Security Hub performs a check from the AWS Foundations CIS Benchmark that, if implemented, would help towards detecting the brute forcing of accounts. AWS Security Hub provides this detection with the following checks. 3.6 Ensure a log metric filter and alarm exist for AWS Management Console authentication failures This is scored as Minimal because it only applies to the AWS Management Console and not other access mechanisms (e.g., CLI, SDK, etc.) and it only supports a subset of the sub-techniques. Furthermore, it does not detect brute-forcing methods for other components such as EC2 instances.

This control may not provide any mitigation against password cracking.

Multiple conditions along can be combined to create fine-grained and specific policies that partially enforce access controls to account resources that adversaries may attempt to abuse: conditional access to Cloud APIs, blocking legacy authentication, requiring multi-factor authentication for users, block access by location, block access to unsupported devices, failed login attempts, account lockout policies, etc.. These features may require Microsoft Entra ID P2.

Conditional Access can be used to enforce MFA for users which provides significant protection against password compromises, requiring an adversary to complete an additional authentication method before their access is permitted.

Conditional Access can be used to enforce MFA for users which provides significant protection against password compromises, requiring an adversary to complete an additional authentication method before their access is permitted.

Entra ID's continuous access evaluation is a security control implemented by enabling services to subscribe to critical Microsoft Entra events. Those events can then be evaluated and enforced near real time. This process enables tenant users lose access to organizational SharePoint Online files, email, calendar, or tasks, and Teams from Microsoft 365 client apps within minutes after a critical event is detected. The following events are currently evaluated: User Account is deleted or disabled Password for a user is changed or reset Multifactor authentication is enabled for the user Administrator explicitly revokes all refresh tokens for a user High user risk detected by Microsoft Entra ID Protection License Requirements: Continuous access evaluation will be included in all versions of Microsoft 365.

This control provides significant detection of some of the sub-techniques of this technique and has therefore been assessed an overall score of Partial.

Microsoft Defender security alerts explain the suspicious activities detected by Defender for Identity sensors on your network, and the actors and computers involved in each threat. Alert evidence lists contain direct links to the involved users and computers, to help make your investigations easy and direct. Defender security alerts are divided into the following categories or phases, like the phases seen in a typical cyber-attack kill chain. Learn more about each phase, the alerts designed to detect each attack, and how to use the alerts to help protect your network using the following links: Reconnaissance and discovery alerts Persistence and privilege escalation alerts Credential access alerts Lateral movement alerts Other alerts License: A Microsoft 365 security product license entitles customer use of Microsoft Defender XDR.

This control can detect some activity indicative of brute force attempts to login. Relevant alert is "Multiple failed login attempts".

Microsoft Secure Score is a measurement of an organization's security posture, with a higher number indicating more recommended actions taken. It can be found at Microsoft Secure Score in the Microsoft Defender portal. Following the Secure Score recommendations can protect your organization from threats. From a centralized dashboard in the Microsoft Defender portal, organizations can monitor and work on the security of their Microsoft 365 identities, apps, and devices. Your score is updated in real time to reflect the information presented in the visualizations and recommended action pages. Secure Score also syncs daily to receive system data about your achieved points for each action. To help you find the information you need more quickly, Microsoft recommended actions are organized into groups: Identity (Microsoft Entra accounts & roles) Device (Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, known as Microsoft Secure Score for Devices) Apps (email and cloud apps, including Office 365 and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps) Data (through Microsoft Information Protection)

Microsoft recommended the use of Passwordless authentication. This method provides the most secure MFA sign-in process by replacing the password with something you have, plus something you are or something you know.(e.g., Biometric, FIDO2 security keys, Microsoft’s Authenticator app). When combined with Conditional Access policies, Passwordless Authentication can significantly protect against the likelihood of adversary activity from credential attacks (e.g., brute force, token theft, etc.). License Requirements: All Microsoft Entra ID licenses

This control provides significant protection against this brute force technique by completing obviating the need for passwords by replacing it with passwordless credentials.

This control provides Minimal detection for one of this technique's sub-techniques while not providing any detection for the remaining, resulting in a Minimal score.

Provides significant response capabilities for one of this technique's sub-techniques (Password Spray). Due to this capability being specific to one of its sub-techniques and not its remaining sub-techniques, the coverage score is Minimal resulting in an overall Minimal score.

Microsoft Entra ID Protection helps organizations detect, investigate, and remediate identity-based risks. These identity-based risks can be further fed into tools like Conditional Access to make access decisions or fed back to a security information and event management (SIEM) tool for further investigation and correlation. During each sign-in, Identity Protection runs all real-time sign-in detections generating a sign-in session risk level, indicating how likely the sign-in has been compromised. Based on this risk level, policies are then applied to protect the user and the organization. Risk-based Conditional Access policies can be enabled to require access controls such as providing a strong authentication method, perform multi-factor authentication, or perform a secure password reset based on the detected risk level. If the user successfully completes the access control, the risk is automatically remediated. License Requirements: Microsoft Entra ID P2

The MFA recommendation provides significant protection against password compromises, but because this is a recommendation and doesn't actually enforce MFA, the assessed score is capped at Partial.

An incident in Microsoft Defender XDR is a collection of correlated alerts and associated data that make up the story of an attack. Microsoft 365 services and apps create alerts when they detect a suspicious or malicious event or activity. Individual alerts provide valuable clues about a completed or ongoing attack. Attacks typically employ various techniques against different types of entities, such as devices, users, and mailboxes. The result of this is multiple alerts for multiple entities in your tenant. Piecing the individual alerts together to gain insight into an attack can be challenging and time-consuming, Microsoft Defender XDR automatically aggregates the alerts and their associated information into an incident. A typical Incident Response workflow in Microsoft Defender XDR begins with a triage action, next is the investigate action, and finally is the response action. Microsoft 365 Defender Incident Response responds to Brute Force attacks due to its password spray Incident Response playbook which monitors for many failed authentication attempts across various accounts that may result from password spraying attempts. License Requirements: Microsoft Defender XDR

Advanced hunting is a query-based threat hunting tool that lets you explore up to 30 days of raw data. Advanced hunting in Microsoft Defender XDR allows you to proactively hunt for threats across: Devices managed by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Emails processed by Microsoft 365, Cloud app activities, authentication events, and domain controller activities. With this level of visibility, you can quickly hunt for threats that traverse sections of your network, including sophisticated intrusions that arrive on email or the web, elevate local privileges, acquire privileged domain credentials, and move laterally to across your devices. Advanced hunting supports two modes, guided and advanced. Users use advanced mode if they are comfortable using Kusto Query Language (KQL) to create queries from scratch. Advanced Threat Hunting Detects Brute Force attacks due to the IdentityLogonEvents table in the advanced hunting schema which contains information about all authentication activities related to Microsoft online services captured by Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps which monitors authentication logs for system and application login failures of Valid Accounts. License Requirements: Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan 2

Defender for Identity LMPs are visual guides that help you quickly understand and identify exactly how attackers can move laterally inside your network. The purpose of lateral movements within the cyber-attack kill chain are for attackers to gain and compromise your sensitive accounts using non-sensitive accounts. Compromising your sensitive accounts gets them another step closer to their ultimate goal, domain dominance. To stop these attacks from being successful, Defender for Identity LMPs give you easy to interpret, direct visual guidance on your most vulnerable, sensitive accounts.

App governance in Defender for Cloud Apps is a set of security and policy management capabilities designed for OAuth-enabled apps registered on Microsoft Entra ID, Google, and Salesforce. App governance delivers visibility, remediation, and governance into how these apps and their users access, use, and share sensitive data in Microsoft 365 and other cloud platforms through actionable insights and automated policy alerts and actions. App governance also enables you to see which user-installed OAuth applications have access to data on Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce. It tells you what permissions the apps have and which users have granted access to their accounts. App governance insights enable you to make informed decisions around blocking or restricting apps that present significant risk to your organization App Governance Detects Brute Force attacks due to App Governance monitoring aggregated sign-in activity for each app and tracking all risky sign-in's. License Requirements: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

MFA provides significant protection against password compromises, requiring the adversary to complete an additional authentication method before their access is permitted.

MFA provides significant protection against password compromises, requiring the adversary to complete an additional authentication method before their access is permitted.

This control provides partial protection for most of this technique's sub-techniques and therefore has been scored as Partial.

A password policy is applied to all user accounts that are created and managed directly in Microsoft Entra ID. By default, an account is locked out after 10 unsuccessful sign-in attempts with the wrong password. License Requirements: Microsoft Entra ID Free, Microsoft Entra ID P1, or Microsoft Entra ID P2

With Microsoft Entra Password Protection, default global banned password lists are automatically applied to all users in a Microsoft Entra tenant. To support your own business and security needs, you can define entries in a custom banned password list. When a password is changed or reset for any user in a Microsoft Entra tenant, the current version of the global banned password list is used to validate the strength of the password. This validation check results in stronger passwords for all Microsoft Entra customers. License Requirements: Microsoft Entra ID Free, Microsoft Entra ID P1, or Microsoft Entra ID P2

With Microsoft Entra Password Protection, default global banned password lists are automatically applied to all users in a Microsoft Entra tenant. To support your own business and security needs, you can define entries in a custom banned password list. When a password is changed or reset for any user in a Microsoft Entra tenant, the current version of the global banned password list is used to validate the strength of the password. This validation check results in stronger passwords for all Microsoft Entra customers. License Requirements: Microsoft Entra ID Free, Microsoft Entra ID P1, or Microsoft Entra ID P2