An attacker leverages the security functionality of the system aimed at thwarting potential attacks to launch a denial of service attack against a legitimate system user. Many systems, for instance, implement a password throttling mechanism that locks an account after a certain number of incorrect log in attempts. An attacker can leverage this throttling mechanism to lock a legitimate user out of their own account. The weakness that is being leveraged by an attacker is the very security feature that has been put in place to counteract attacks.
Likelihood Of Attack
High
Typical Severity
Medium
Relationships
This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern. These relationships are defined as ChildOf and ParentOf, and give insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction. In addition, relationships such as CanFollow, PeerOf, and CanAlsoBe are defined to show similar attack patterns that the user may want to explore.
Nature
Type
ID
Name
ChildOf
Meta Attack Pattern - A meta level attack pattern in CAPEC is a decidedly abstract characterization of a specific methodology or technique used in an attack. A meta attack pattern is often void of a specific technology or implementation and is meant to provide an understanding of a high level approach. A meta level attack pattern is a generalization of related group of standard level attack patterns. Meta level attack patterns are particularly useful for architecture and design level threat modeling exercises.
Investigate account lockout behavior of system: Investigate the security features present in the system that may trigger an account lockout
Techniques
Analyze system documentation to find list of events that could potentially cause account lockout
Obtain user account in system and attempt to lock it out by sending malformed or incorrect data repeatedly
Determine another user's login ID, and attempt to brute force the password (or other credentials) for it a predetermined number of times, or until the system provides an indication that the account is locked out.
Obtain list of user accounts to lock out: Generate a list of valid user accounts to lock out
Techniques
Obtain list of authorized users using another attack pattern, such as SQL Injection.
Attempt to create accounts if possible; system should indicate if a user ID is already taken.
Attempt to brute force user IDs if system reveals whether a given user ID is valid or not upon failed login attempts.
Exploit
Lock Out Accounts: Perform lockout procedure for all accounts that the attacker wants to lock out.
Techniques
For each user ID to be locked out, perform the lockout procedure discovered in the first step.
Prerequisites
The system has a lockout mechanism.
An attacker must be able to reproduce behavior that would result in an account being locked.
Skills Required
[Level: Low]
No programming skills or computer knowledge is needed. An attacker can easily use this attack pattern following the Execution Flow above.
Resources Required
Computer with access to the login portion of the target system
Consequences
This table specifies different individual consequences associated with the attack pattern. The Scope identifies the security property that is violated, while the Impact describes the negative technical impact that arises if an adversary succeeds in their attack. The Likelihood provides information about how likely the specific consequence is expected to be seen relative to the other consequences in the list. For example, there may be high likelihood that a pattern will be used to achieve a certain impact, but a low likelihood that it will be exploited to achieve a different impact.
Scope
Impact
Likelihood
Availability
Resource Consumption
Mitigations
Implement intelligent password throttling mechanisms such as those which take IP address into account, in addition to the login name.
When implementing security features, consider how they can be misused and made to turn on themselves.
Example Instances
A famous example of this type an attack is the eBay attack. eBay always displays the user id of the highest bidder. In the final minutes of the auction, one of the bidders could try to log in as the highest bidder three times. After three incorrect log in attempts, eBay password throttling would kick in and lock out the highest bidder's account for some time. An attacker could then make their own bid and their victim would not have a chance to place the counter bid because they would be locked out. Thus an attacker could win the auction.
Related Weaknesses
A Related Weakness relationship associates a weakness with this attack pattern. Each association implies a weakness that must exist for a given attack to be successful. If multiple weaknesses are associated with the attack pattern, then any of the weaknesses (but not necessarily all) may be present for the attack to be successful. Each related weakness is identified by a CWE identifier.
CAPEC mappings to ATT&CK techniques leverage an inheritance model to streamline and minimize direct CAPEC/ATT&CK mappings. Inheritance of a mapping is indicated by text stating that the parent CAPEC has relevant ATT&CK mappings. Note that the ATT&CK Enterprise Framework does not use an inheritance model as part of the mapping to CAPEC.
Description
This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern. These relationships are defined as ChildOf and ParentOf, and give insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction. In addition, relationships such as CanFollow, PeerOf, and CanAlsoBe are defined to show similar attack patterns that the user may want to explore.
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