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T1110.001: T1110.001

View on MITRE ATT&CK The MITRE Corporation · Published 11/02/2020 19:38 · Modified 27/03/2026 01:08

Essential information

MITRE technique ID
T1110.001
Confidence
100/100
Revoked
No
Published
11/02/2020 19:38
Modified
27/03/2026 01:08
Author / Source
The MITRE Corporation

Aliases

Password Guessing

Platforms

windows macos linux Network Devices Containers IaaS ESXi Office Suite Identity Provider SaaS

Description

Adversaries with no prior knowledge of legitimate credentials within the system or environment may guess passwords to attempt access to accounts. Without knowledge of the password for an account, an adversary may opt to systematically guess the password using a repetitive or iterative mechanism. An adversary may guess login credentials without prior knowledge of system or environment passwords during an operation by using a list of common passwords. Password guessing may or may not take into account the target's policies on password complexity or use policies that may lock accounts out after a number of failed attempts. Guessing passwords can be a risky option because it could cause numerous authentication failures and account lockouts, depending on the organization's login failure policies. (Citation: Cylance Cleaver) Typically, management services over commonly used ports are used when guessing passwords. Commonly targeted services include the following: * SSH (22/TCP) * Telnet (23/TCP) * FTP (21/TCP) * NetBIOS / SMB / Samba (139/TCP & 445/TCP) * LDAP (389/TCP) * Kerberos (88/TCP) * RDP / Terminal Services (3389/TCP) * HTTP/HTTP Management Services (80/TCP & 443/TCP) * MSSQL (1433/TCP) * Oracle (1521/TCP) * MySQL (3306/TCP) * VNC (5900/TCP) * SNMP (161/UDP and 162/TCP/UDP) In addition to management services, adversaries may "target single sign-on (SSO) and cloud-based applications utilizing federated authentication protocols," as well as externally facing email applications, such as Office 365.(Citation: US-CERT TA18-068A 2018). Further, adversaries may abuse network device interfaces (such as `wlanAPI`) to brute force accessible wifi-router(s) via wireless authentication protocols.(Citation: Trend Micro Emotet 2020) In default environments, LDAP and Kerberos connection attempts are less likely to trigger events over SMB, which creates Windows "logon failure" event ID 4625.

Kill chain phases

Kill chainPhase
mitre-attack credential-access

Marking (TLP)

TLP:CLEAR Copyright 2015-2025, The MITRE Corporation. MITRE ATT&CK and ATT&CK are registered trademarks of The MITRE Corporation.

External references

Related entities

Intrusion sets, malware, reports, vulnerabilities, indicators and other entities linked to this technique.