There’s been a lot of chatter lately about moving on from passwords. But long passwords are still a good defense against some types of attacks. Brute force attack actors dedicate just a fraction of their efforts to cracking them, a Microsoft researcher found.

The researcher analyzed over 25 million brute force attack attempts that occurred across their employer’s sensor network. What they found means most of these passwords are safe from this particular type of attack. It won’t help if your password has been leaked online, though. It also doesn’t help if your password already exists as part of an attacker’s brute force attack dictionary. But it does count for something.

“77% of attempts used a password between one and seven characters. A password over 10 characters was only seen in 6% of cases,” the researcher explained, as quoted by The Record.

In his analysis of those attack attempts, the security researcher found that less than half (39%) of the brute force attack attempts involved at least one number. Just 7% of those attack instances contained a special character, while none of the brute-force attempts included white space.

Attackers using this method more often

Bruce force attacks are becoming more common. In September 2021, MSSP Alert reported that the share of brute-force campaigns compared to all other attack operations increased from 13% to 32% between September 2020 and September 2021. About a quarter (26%) of organizations were on the receiving end of brute force attacks during that period.

In September, Threatpost reported on a campaign in which threat actors compromised as many as 100,000 inboxes on a daily basis. The operation consisted of malicious actors targeting gift cards and customer-loyalty program data. Once they grabbed it, they monetized it on the darknet or redeemed it for goods and services.

How to defend against brute force attacks

One effective deterrent is to implement a policy that requires users to leverage passwords consisting of at least 10 characters. There’s an important caveat here, however, in that longer passwords don’t automatically increase organizations’ overall level of digital security.

At best, there’s the potential for longer passwords to translate into more password reset requests and, by extension, more wasted time for help desk teams. At worst, these types of policies could motivate users to reuse variants of the same password across multiple web accounts, a practice that increases their exposure to credential stuffing.

Organizations therefore might want to consider combining this type of policy with other security controls such as multi-factor authentication, single-sign-on and password managers. Or, ditch passwords altogether and embrace passwordless authentication.

More from Identity & Access

From federation to fabric: IAM’s evolution

15 min read - In the modern day, we’ve come to expect that our various applications can share our identity information with one another. Most of our core systems federate seamlessly and bi-directionally. This means that you can quite easily register and log in to a given service with the user account from another service or even invert that process (technically possible, not always advisable). But what is the next step in our evolution towards greater interoperability between our applications, services and systems?Identity and…

X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2024 reveals stolen credentials as top risk, with AI attacks on the horizon

4 min read - Every year, IBM X-Force analysts assess the data collected across all our security disciplines to create the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, our annual report that plots changes in the cyber threat landscape to reveal trends and help clients proactively put security measures in place. Among the many noteworthy findings in the 2024 edition of the X-Force report, three major trends stand out that we’re advising security professionals and CISOs to observe: A sharp increase in abuse of valid accounts…

Web injections are back on the rise: 40+ banks affected by new malware campaign

8 min read - Web injections, a favored technique employed by various banking trojans, have been a persistent threat in the realm of cyberattacks. These malicious injections enable cyber criminals to manipulate data exchanges between users and web browsers, potentially compromising sensitive information. In March 2023, security researchers at IBM Security Trusteer uncovered a new malware campaign using JavaScript web injections. This new campaign is widespread and particularly evasive, with historical indicators of compromise (IOCs) suggesting a possible connection to DanaBot — although we…

Topic updates

Get email updates and stay ahead of the latest threats to the security landscape, thought leadership and research.
Subscribe today