Credential Harvesting

Dictionary Term

Alternative Forms

• Harvesting

Definitions

Definition 1

Credential harvesting is a class of cyberattacks characterized by collecting information on available authentication mechanisms (e.g., identity attributes, certificates, credentials, and sessions) to leverage this information to compromise information security domains and/or abuse identities.

Credential harvesting opportunistically seeks to find exploitable authentication solutions. It is distinct from attacks that target specific identities.

Credential harvesting may be used during various attack stages, including reconnaissance, initial exploitation, privilege escalation, and lateral movement.^④

Information collected by credential harvesting pertains to authentication-related information types that may be leveraged for exploitation, such as identity attributes, credentials, or session information. This comprises:

• Email address^⑤⑥

• Login ID

• Password

• Password hash

• Private key

• Session ID

• SSH key

The data sources from where credential information may be harvested vary. Typical ones are:

• Address books^②

• Browser history^②

• Computer memory (e.g., cached credentials, login ids, plaintext passwords, session tokens)^④

• Configuration files

• Databases

• Documents (e.g., email addresses, login ids, passwords)

• Email or application services that allow guessing attributes/dictionary attacks

• Identity repositories (e.g., LDAP, Windows Active Directory)

• People (through social engineering)

• Phishing or trojan websites (e.g., login ids, passwords, second authentication factor)^③

• Reusable identity attributes or credentials obtained from previous data breaches

• Web cookies^③

• Web query parameters^③

• Web sites, social networks, and forums (e.g., email addresses via web scraping)^①

• Windows registry

Among these, some information may be publicly or easily available (e.g., email addresses that may be collected by web scraping on public websites or forums while others may be protected and harder to reach, e.g., cached credentials stored in computer memory.

The collected information may be insufficient for exploitation and may need to be complemented with other techniques (e.g., executing a dictionary attack on harvested password hashes).

Credential harvesting may be designated by the identity attribute or credential that is being harvested. Password harvesting specifically focuses on passwords. Email harvesting is a specialized and limited form of credential harvesting frequently used for phishing purposes.^①

Information may be collected:

• by accessing it directly (e.g., when it is publicly or easily available (e.g., email addresses collected by web scraping^① or scanning configuration files),

• by hacking it (e.g., accessing live memory to read cached credentials)

• by guessing it (e.g., email addresses or login ids)^⑧

Threat actors engaging in credential harvesting may vary. They include:

• Bots, crawlers, scanners^①②

• Humans

• Worms^⑥

Example countermeasures that may be effective against credential harvesting include:

• Access controls / need-to-know

• Deception (canary identities, honeypots)^⑤⑦

• Disabling credential caching

• Digital Rights Management (DRM)

• Encryption

• Hardware Security Module (HSM)

• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

• Not reusing passwords^①

• Password Managers

• Privileged Access Management (PAM)

• Security awareness programs

• System hardening

Sample Sentences

Eve, the hacker, tricked Bob, the user, by cleverly forging a spearphishing email. When Bob clicked on that link, he did not notice anything unusual but his laptop got compromised. Once in, Eve started to harvest credentials with the intention to make a lateral movement within Bob’s corporate network. Luckily for her, she quickly found the cached credentials of Alice, an engineer from the IT support team who previously logged in on Bob’s laptop to help him with a technical issue.

Conceptual Diagram

Image Added

Related Terms

Quotes

Bibliography

• ^①

  Anchor
  albanese-and-sonnenreich-2004 albanese-and-sonnenreich-2004

  Albanese and Sonnenreich, 2004

• ^②

  Anchor
  anderson-2020 anderson-2020

  Anderson, 2020

• ^③

  Anchor
  benantar-2006 benantar-2006

  Benantar, 2006

• ^④

  Anchor
  bradley-2019 bradley-2019

  Bradley, 2019

• ^⑤

  Anchor
  brotherston-and-berlin-2017 brotherston-and-berlin-2017

  Brotherston and Berlin, 2017

• ^⑥

  Anchor
  cert-cc-ca-2001-26-2001 cert-cc-ca-2001-26-2001

  CERT/CC, CA-2001-26, 2001

• ^⑦

  Anchor
  gajek-and-sadeghi-2008 gajek-and-sadeghi-2008

  Gajek and Sadeghi, 2008

• ^⑧

  Anchor
  nemeth-et-al-2011 nemeth-et-al-2011

  Nemeth et al., 2011

See Also