CAPEC-653: Use of Known Operating System Credentials

An adversary guesses or obtains (i.e. steals or purchases) legitimate operating system credentials (e.g. userID/password) to achieve authentication and to perform authorized actions on the system, under the guise of an authenticated user or service. This applies to any Operating System.

Severity:High

Possibility:High

Extended Description

This attack can be extremely harmful when the operating system credentials used are for a root or admin user. Once an adversary gains access using credentials with elevated privileges, they are free to alter important system files which can effect other users who may use the system or other users on the system's network.

Mitigations

Leverage multi-factor authentication for all authentication services and prior to granting an entity access to the network.

Create a strong password policy and ensure that your system enforces this policy.

Ensure users are not reusing username/password combinations for multiple systems, applications, or services.

Do not reuse local administrator account credentials across systems.

Deny remote use of local admin credentials to log into domain systems.

Do not allow accounts to be a local administrator on more than one system.

Implement an intelligent password throttling mechanism. Care must be taken to assure that these mechanisms do not excessively enable account lockout attacks such as CAPEC-2.

Monitor system and domain logs for abnormal credential access.