Business owners and managers should know that even normal users’ credentials that can end up in the wrong hands can be a devastating weapon in this digital age. Hackers could disrupt your business processes, access proprietary data, intercept vital information, and more. Hackers have many password attack methods for circumnavigating your enterprise single-factor authentication. If you are looking for ways to user management efforts, you must understand these methods.
Here are some of the password attack methods hackers commonly used:
Phishing
Often, hackers send out unsuspecting emails that pose legitimate and known services to disguise their phishing attacks. Through these emails, they take users to fake login pages disguised as legitimate service. They usually add a subtle, threatening dimension to the emails such as the possibility of service cancellation, forcing users to hand over their credentials before thinking twice.
Moreover, hackers set out social engineering attacks that use the workplace’s social conventions to fool users. They could pose as the IT team and directly request users to give their passwords without risking detection.
Dictionary Attack
This kind of password attack lets hackers employ a program that cycles through common words. It also depends on a few key factors of users’ psychology. For instance, users pick short passwords based on common words. Thus, a dictionary attack begins with such words and variations that include replacing letters with numbers or adding numbers at the end.
Brute Force Attack
This method is perhaps the easiest for hackers to perform. In this attack, a computer program is used by hackers to log in to a user’s account with all potential password combinations. Also, brute force accounts do not start at random; rather, they start with the easiest-to-guess passwords. Keep in mind that when hackers gain access to your list of employees, they can easily guess usernames.
Credential Stuffing
In this password attack method, hackers use your list of stolen usernames and passwords in combination on different accounts, trying over and over until they find a match. It depends on the tendency of users to reuse their passwords for several accounts, usually to great success. Moreover, stolen passwords are shared on the Dark Web or sold. Thus, such information proliferates among threat actors.
To protect your enterprise from any password attacks, you must face the fact that passwords are always vulnerable to attacks. Indeed, any form of single-factor authentication leaves your IT environment open to hackers. Thus, instead of depending on passwords, call upon next-generation privileged access management solution to deploy multifactor authentication.
