T1110.002 Password Cracking

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

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 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 protects against Password Cracking through the use of hardened access control policies, secure defaults, password complexity requirements, multifactor authentication requirements, and removal of terminated accounts.

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.

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.

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.

MFA can significantly reduce the impact of a password compromise, requiring the adversary to complete an additional authentication method before their access is permitted.

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.

The following AWS Config managed rules can identify configuration problems that should be fixed in order to ensure multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled properly, which can significantly impede brute force authentication attempts by requiring adversaries to provide a second form of authentication even if they succeed in brute forcing a password via one of these sub-techniques: "iam-user-mfa-enabled", "mfa-enabled-for-iam-console-access", "root-account-hardware-mfa-enabled", and "root-account-mfa-enabled". The "iam-password-policy" managed rule can identify insufficient password requirements that should be fixed in order to make brute force authentication more difficult by increasing the complexity of user passwords and decreasing the amount of time before they are rotated, giving adversaries less time to brute force passwords and making it more time consuming and resource intensive to do so. This is especially important in the case of Password Cracking, since adversaries in possession of password hashes may be able to recover usable credentials more quickly and do so without generating detectable noise via invalid login attempts. All of these controls are run periodically, but implemented policies are enforced continuously once set and coverage factor is significant, resulting in an overall score of Significant.

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 can significantly reduce the impact of a password compromise, 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 can significantly reduce the impact of a password compromise, requiring an adversary to complete an additional authentication method before their access is permitted.

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 password based attacks by completing obviating the need for passwords by replacing it with passwordless credentials.

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

This control's "Require MFA for administrative roles" and "Ensure all users can complete multi-factor authentication for secure access" recommendations for enabling MFA can significantly lead to reducing the impact of a password compromise of accounts, requiring the adversary to complete an additional authentication method before their access is permitted. This control's "Do not expire passwords" recommendation also can lead to mitigating the Password Guessing or Cracking sub-techniques by disabling password reset which tends to lead to users selecting weaker passwords. This control's "Enable policy to block legacy authentication" and "Stop legacy protocols communication" recommendations can lead to protecting against these brute force attacks as Microsoft research has shown organizations that have disabled legacy authentication experience 67 percent fewer compromises than those where legacy authentication is enabled. Additionally, the same research shows that more than 99 percent of password spray and more than 97 percent of credential stuffing attacks use legacy authentication. This control's "Resolve unsecure account attributes" recommendation can lead to detecting accounts with disabled (Kerberos) Preauthentication which can enable offline Password Cracking. Because these are recommendations and do not 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 Password Cracking 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 Password Cracking 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 Password Cracking 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 can significantly reduce the impact of a password cracking, requiring the adversary to complete an additional authentication method before access is permitted. Based on studies, your account is less likely to get compromised by 99.9% by enabling MFA against the following techniques, for example: phishing, brute force, credential stuffing, key logging, etc.

The password restrictions provided by the default Password policy can provide partial protection against password cracking but a determined adversary with sufficient resources can still be successful with this attack vector. In regards to Credential Stuffing, the password policy's lockout threshold can be partially effective in mitigating this sub-technique as it may lock the account before the correct credential is attempted. Although with credential stuffing, the number of passwords attempted for an account is often (much) fewer than with Password Guessing reducing the effectiveness of a lockout threshold. This led to its score being assessed as Partial rather than Significant (as was assessed for Password Guessing).

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. Further incorrect sign-in attempts lock out the user in real time for increasing durations of time. License Requirements: Microsoft Entra ID Free, Microsoft Entra ID P1, or Microsoft Entra ID P2

Microsoft Entra Password Protection efficiently blocks known weak passwords likely to be used in password cracking attacks. License Requirements: Microsoft Entra ID Free, Microsoft Entra ID P1, or Microsoft Entra ID P2