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Password Report: Honeypot Knowledge Exhibits Bot Assault Traits Towards RDP, SSH

By Kevin Townsend on October 20, 2022

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An evaluation of knowledge collected by Rapid7’s RDP and SSH honeypots between September 10, 2021, and September 9, 2022, discovered tens of hundreds of thousands of connection makes an attempt. The honeypots captured 215,894 distinctive IP supply addresses and 512,002 distinctive passwords throughout RDP and SSH honeypots. Nearly all of the passwords (99.997%) will be present in rockyou2021.txt.

In 2009, Rockyou was hacked. The attackers discovered and stole 32 million cleartext person accounts. A subsequently uncovered checklist of 14,341,564 passwords grew to become the unique rockyou.txt extensively utilized in dictionary assaults and included with Kali Linux to assist penetration testing.

Over the next years extra password lists have been added to the unique, culminating within the rockyou2021.txt assortment now comprising about 8.four billion passwords in a 92 GB textual content file. That is freely accessible on GitHub.

“We use the rockyou set as a supply of passwords that attackers can trivially generate and take a look at, to see if there may be some evolution past using a password checklist,” explains Rapid7 in its Good Passwords for Dangerous Bots report (PDF).

That 99.99% of the passwords used to assault the Rapid7 honeypots will be discovered on this password checklist might be an understatement. Solely 14 of the 497,848 passwords used within the SSH assaults aren’t included in rockyou2021 – and every considered one of these embody the IP handle of the attacked honeypot. Rapid7 suggests this can be a programming error within the scanner being utilized by the attacker.

Just one password amongst these used to assault the RDP honeypots shouldn’t be included in rockyou2021. That is ‘AuToLoG2019.09.25’, which was the thirteenth most used password. This can be a little puzzling, however the report notes there are malware samples containing the ‘AuToLoG’ string. “The samples are categorised as generic trojans by most antivirus distributors however seem to have RDP credentials hardcoded into them,” feedback the report.

Other than the SSH ‘errors’ and the only AuToLog RDP password, each different password used within the honeypot assaults will be present in rockyou2021. Honeypot assaults are, by their nature, automated opportunistic bot assaults. 

Rapid7’s evaluation of the passwords used exhibits a heavy choice for the usual recognized generally used passwords. The highest 5 RDP password makes an attempt had been ‘ ‘ (the empty string), ‘123’, ‘password’, ‘123qwe’, and ‘admin’. The highest 5 SSH password makes an attempt had been ‘123456’, ‘nproc’, ‘take a look at’, ‘qwerty’, and ‘password’. These and each different password might have been sourced from rockyou2021.

However rockyou2021 is successfully only a large thesaurus. It doesn’t embody random, combined ASCII and particular character strings. Whereas it consists of one thing like 8.four billion strings, an entire checklist of all attainable ASCII seven-character strings would comprise round 70 trillion prospects (95^7). This might rise dramatically with any enhance within the password size.

The overriding conclusion from Rapid7’s evaluation is that using lengthy, robust random strings reminiscent of these generated by password managers and never prone to be included in ‘dictionaries’ would offer a really robust protection in opposition to opportunistic bot-driven automated assaults.

Tod Beardsley, Fast 7’s director of analysis, factors out that these automated assaults are low-cost, however not no-cost. “The focus on lame and default passwords demonstrates that there are nonetheless sufficient in widespread use to make the assaults worthwhile for the attackers,” he advised SecurityWeek. This in flip signifies that password managers aren’t but the default methodology of producing and storing passwords.

The issue with password managers is that they aren’t straightforward or essentially intuitive to make use of. “The UX is poor, and so they are typically a bit clunky – and the extra friction stops folks utilizing them,” stated Beardsley. “We’re failing to teach folks on using password managers to generate and retailer a protracted, robust random password.”

However he added, size is much more vital than complexity. “Password size is the secret on the subject of having good passwords.” He even famous that within the age of distant working, the concept of the long-derided ‘password pocket book’ saved securely at dwelling turns into a practical possibility.

However the major takeaway from this Rapid7 analysis is that if corporations and other people can situation themselves to generate passwords of ample size (Beardsley makes use of 14 characters) containing just a few particular characters, there’s a robust probability that the present era of automated opportunistic assaults in opposition to RDP and SSH will probably be defeated.

This doesn’t apply to particular person focused assaults. That’s a distinct story.

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