2017 Credential Spill Report

Over the past 12 months, we have seen dozens of the world’s largest online services report that they had been breached by attackers who were able to gain access to their customers’ login credential data. By the end of 2016, over three billion credentials in total were reported stolen, at an average pace of one new credential spill reported every week.

These numbers are a record and include the two largest reported credential spills of all time, both by Yahoo. Near the end of the year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology published the Draft NIST Special Publication 800–63B Digital Identity Guidelines, recommending that online account systems check their users’ passwords against known spilled credential lists.

As the size and frequency of credential spills appears to be increasing, today we are publishing the 2017 Credential Spill Report. This report includes key findings from the credential spills reported in the past year and data from the Shape network to provide insight into the scale of credential theft and how stolen credentials are used.

In particular, stolen credentials are now used every day in credential stuffing attacks on all major online services. In these attacks, cybercriminals test for the reuse of passwords across websites and mobile applications. In the past, announcements of credential spills would focus on the security of accounts at the organization which reported the data breach, but now people are realizing that the widespread reuse of passwords by users across websites means that a breach on one account system endangers all other account systems.

At Shape, we have a unique view into this activity because our technology protects the world’s most attacked web and mobile applications — those run by the largest corporations in financial services, retail, travel, and other industries, as well as the largest government agencies — on a 24/7 basis.

Key statistics from spills reported in the past year include:

Over 3 billion credentials were reported stolen in 2016.

• 51 companies reported suffering a breach where user credentials were stolen.
• Yahoo in 2016 reported the two largest credential spills of all time. The next largest credential spills in 2016 were reported by Friend Finder, MySpace, Badoo and LinkedIn.
• Tech companies had the largest total number of spilled credentials (1.75 billion).
• The gaming industry had the largest number of companies with spills (11).

From Shape’s network data, we also observed:

• 90% of login requests on many of the world’s largest web and mobile applications is attributable to traffic from credential stuffing attacks.
• There is up to a 2% success rate for account takeover from credential stuffing attacks, meaning that cybercriminals are taking over millions of accounts across the Internet on a daily basis as a result of credential spills.
• Credential stuffing attacks are now the single largest source of account takeover on most major websites and mobile applications.
• One Fortune 100 retailer experienced a credential stuffing attack with over 10,000 login attempts in one day coming from the cybercriminal attack tool Sentry MBA, which is the most popular credential stuffing software and appears to be used to attack nearly every company in every industry.
• Analyzing 15.5M account login attempts for one customer during a four month period, over 500K accounts were confirmed to be on publicly spilled credential lists.

Dealing with credential spills and the credential stuffing attacks that they fuel is a complex topic. Here are some basic recommended actions for consumers and enterprises:

The most important takeaway for consumers is that you should never reuse passwords across online accounts. Selecting a strong password is not enough; if you have reused that same password on multiple sites, and one of those sites is breached, your accounts on all of the other sites where you have used the same password are now at risk.

For companies, a lot of public attention is focused on any organization that experiences a data breach and loses control of their users’ credentials. However, the real issue other companies should focus on is protecting themselves against those passwords being used to attack them and their own users. Credential stuffing attacks easily bypass simple security controls like CAPTCHA and Web Application Firewalls, so relying on those mechanisms does not offer any protection. Controls like two-factor authentication can help, but of course come with other drawbacks.

In any case, getting educated is the best course of action. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) provides a starting point for learning about credential stuffing and other automated attacks in their list of OWASP Automated Threats To Web Applications.

To learn more, download the full 2017 Credential Spill Report.

Dan Woods,

Director, Shape Intelligence Center

Originally published at blog.shapesecurity.com on January 17, 2017.