Description

Okta, an identity and access management services provider, has issued a warning regarding a significant increase in credential stuffing attacks targeting online services. This surge in attacks has been facilitated by the widespread availability of residential proxy services, lists of previously compromised credentials ("combo lists"), and automation tools. According to Okta's advisory, there has been a notable rise in the frequency and scale of these attacks throughout March 2024. Between March 18, 2024, and April 16, 2024, Duo Security and Cisco Talos observed large-scale brute-force attacks targeting various services, including VPN services, web application authentication interfaces, and SSH services. The affected services include Cisco Secure Firewall VPN, Checkpoint VPN, Fortinet VPN, SonicWall VPN, RD Web Services, MikroTik, Draytek, and Ubiquiti. From April 19, 2024, to April 26, 2024, Okta's Identity Threat Research team noted a spike in credential stuffing activity against user accounts from infrastructure that appears to be similar. Credential stuffing attacks involve hackers using large sets of username and password combinations, often obtained from previous data breaches, phishing campaigns, or info-stealer infections, to gain unauthorized access to user accounts on various online services. These attacks route requests through anonymizing services like TOR and residential proxies such as NSOCKS, Luminati, and DataImpulse. Okta experts have observed millions of requests being routed through these services. Residential proxies (RESIPs) are networks of legitimate user devices used to route traffic for paying subscribers, often without their knowledge. Threat actors use these RESIPs to evade detection. Most of the traffic in these credential stuffing attacks appears to originate from the mobile devices and browsers of everyday users, rather than from the IP space of VPS providers. Okta's advisory includes recommendations to mitigate the risk of account takeovers from credential stuffing attacks, along with the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used in recent campaigns.