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Verizon DBIR: Credential Vulnerabilities

Credential Vulnerabilities Most Likely Breach Culprit: Verizon DBIR

According to Verizon’s recently released 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), over 80% of hacking-related breaches involved the use of lost or stolen credentials. We analyzed the findings and uncovered some additional data points that underscore how pervasive and detrimental poor password practices are to businesses today. Looking at the DBIR data in detail, approximately 35% of all breaches were initiated due to weak or compromised credentials.

To put it another way, your company is more likely to have a breach as a result of stolen or weak credentials than any other single reason. So, why do companies continue to struggle with password security when it’s clearly such a business-critical issue?

There are a variety of factors, among them:

  • Password Reuse. We’ve written about this multiple times before on this blog but it bears repeating: the majority of people reuse passwords and share them across both personal and work accounts even though they recognize the inherent security vulnerabilities. This pervasive bad habit has been around for years, and it shows no signs of abating as the world grows increasingly digital and reliant on more online accounts and services.

  • The Friction Factor. Employees typically demand efficiency and convenience from their enterprise systems and applications, and can balk when too much friction is introduced into the process. If authentication mechanisms are overly burdensome, many will default to poor password practices or risky behavior like sharing credentials with colleagues.

  • The Long-Tail Effect. When hackers obtain stolen credentials from the Dark Web, they don’t often act on this information right away. For example, as we noted in a previous post, the exposure of credentials from the NIH, WHO and others engaged in the fight against COVID-19 was due to prior breaches with the 2016 LinkedIn attack being the primary source. Underscoring this issue, research from Virginia Tech University found that over 70% of users employed a compromised password for other accounts up to a year after it was initially leaked, with 40% reusing passwords which were leaked over three years ago.

As the DBIR put it, “Criminals are clearly in love with credentials, and why not since they make their jobs much easier?” In this environment, the only way companies can fight back is by employing a solution that continually screens for compromised credentials and introduces friction only when the situation warrants it. With breaches happening on a near real-time basis, it’s not enough to check password security only at its creation. Organizations need an ongoing way to ensure that credentials that were once secure have not become compromised, and that’s where Enzoic comes in.

There’s plenty to worry about in the modern threat landscape but compromised credentials should not be one of them. Learn more about our approach, and how we can help you eradicate the credential vulnerability for good.

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More Information
This site is for EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.
Your password will be sent securely to the Enzoic servers to check if it is compromised. We do not store your password or use it for any other purpose. If you are not comfortable with this, do not enter your real password.
What is this?

Password Check is a free tool that lets you determine not just the strength of a password (how complex it is), but also whether it is known to be compromised. Billions of user passwords have been exposed by hackers on the web and dark web over the years and as a result they are no longer safe to use. So even if your password is very long and complex, and thus very strong, it may still be a bad choice if it appears on this list of compromised passwords. This is what the Password Check tool was designed to tell you and why it is superior to traditional password strength estimators you may find elsewhere on the web.

Why is it needed?

If you are using one of these compromised passwords, it puts you at additional risk, especially if you are using the same password on every site you visit. Cybercriminals rely on the fact that most people reuse the same login credentials on multiple sites.

Why is this secure?

This page, and indeed our entire business, exists to help make passwords more secure, not less. While no Internet-connected system can be guaranteed to be impregnable, we keep the risks to an absolute minimum and firmly believe that the risk of unknowingly using compromised passwords is far greater. Since our database of compromised passwords is far larger than what could be downloaded to the browser, the compromised password check we perform must occur server-side. Thus, it is necessary for us to submit a hashed version of your password to our server. To protect this data from eavesdropping, it is submitted over an SSL connection. The data we pass to our server consists of three unsalted hashes of your password, using the MD5, SHA1, and SHA256 algorithms. While unsalted hashes, especially ones using MD5 and SHA1, are NOT a secure way to store passwords, in this case that isn’t their purpose – SSL is securing the transmitted content, not the hashes. Many of the passwords we find on the web are not plaintext; they are unsalted hashes of the passwords. Since we’re not in the business of cracking password hashes, we need these hashes submitted for more comprehensive lookups. We do not store any of the submitted data. It is not persisted in log files and is kept in memory only long enough to perform the lookup, after which the memory is zeroed out. Our server-side infrastructure is hardened against infiltration using industry standard tools and techniques and is routinely tested and reviewed for soundness.

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