The Meaning of “Brute Force Attack”  and How to Detect and Prevent Them

Ever since systems started restricting access through passwords, the trial and error method has been used to crack them. But even today, brute force attacks remain a serious danger for organizations. According to the 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report by Verizon, the brute force technique accounts for 21% of all basic web application attacks.

In this article, we’ll discuss what a brute force attack is, take a look at some key dangers, and figure out how to detect brute force attacks on your organization. Additionally, you’ll learn effective methods of brute force attack prevention.

What is a brute force attack in cybersecurity and why is it so dangerous?

Brute force attacks are performed by malicious actors who submit a large number of passwords until they guess the correct character combination and gain access to a trusted user’s account. Such attacks are incredibly widespread for two reasons:

• It’s easy to execute them using free tools, automation scripts, and password databases.
• Lots of users rely on weak passwords that take seconds to guess.

Experienced hackers use several types of brute force attacks to guess passwords. The most common are:

• Simple brute force attacks — downloading a database of common passwords and trying all of them on a single account.
• Dictionary attacks — trying a list of words drawn from dictionaries, along with their variations amended with special characters and numbers to crack the account password.
• Hybrid brute force attacks — employing external algorithms to generate the most probable password variations, and then trying an extensive range of these variations.
• Reverse brute force attacks — using a set of common passwords against many possible usernames.
• Credential stuffing — utilizing known passwords acquired from data breaches to attempt to log in to various resources. This works when individuals reuse the same credentials across different platforms.

Despite the seemingly simple nature of such attacks, well-known organizations often fall victim to them. For instance, in August 2023, Cisco uncovered efforts to exploit a flaw in its Adaptive Security Appliance and Firepower Threat Defense devices that enabled malicious actors to gain initial access to corporate networks in various organizations through brute forcing. The flaw was actively exploited by ransomware threat actors to break through the security defenses of many organizations, compromise and encrypt data, and demand ransom from victims.

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A brute force attack can result in the following consequences:

Most brute force attacks share common indicators that can help you detect an attack early on and stop it before real harm is done. Here are some of the activities that can give hackers away.

6 brute force attack indicators

What indicators should you look for to stop brute force attacks?

Increased network activity, access violations, and unusual user behavior can all hint at an upcoming attack. However, brute force indicators differ slightly depending on the type of attack and toolset a hacker uses.

The following activities can be indicators of a brute force attack:

Once you’ve learned how to detect them, you can strategize about how to prevent brute force attacks on your organization.

How to detect and prevent brute force attacks: Top 8 effective methods

What are the best strategies for brute force attack mitigation and deterrence?

We’ve put together eight key techniques you can implement for brute force attack detection and prevention. You can implement the majority of these practices with Syteca — an all-in-one insider risk management platform that helps you ensure visibility into account activity and detect signs of brute force attacks.

1. Manage user credentials

Weak passwords make brute force attacks successful. No matter how many cybersecurity awareness training sessions you conduct for your employees and how many policies you enforce, there will always be an employee who uses a “1234” password. So consider taking the matter into your own hands and deploying a dedicated password management tool. Such tools securely manage passwords without involving a user.

2. Limit the number of login attempts

Simple and hybrid brute force attacks rely on multiple login attempts to guess user passwords. This is highly unusual behavior for legitimate users: even if they forget their password, they don’t just try submitting any word they know. Monitoring and limiting the number of login attempts reduces a hacker’s chances of guessing credentials.

If an account exceeds the limit for login attempts, you can start a cooldown timer, force the user to authenticate with multi-factor authentication, or contact an administrator.

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3. Enforce multi-factor authentication

Adding one more authentication factor also makes it much harder to brute force an account. Two-factor authentication (2FA) tools require unique authentication factors from a user that are hard to obtain or falsify. These factors could be an authentication token sent to the user’s phone or a biometric scan, among other options. With 2FA in place, a hacker won’t be able to log in to a user’s account even if they enter the correct login and password.

It’s also a nice practice to back up your MFA with continuous user authentication that can re-verify the user’s identity if any unusual activity is detected.

4. Configure user access rights

Granular management of user access rights doesn’t stop brute forcing but it reduces the attack surface in case a hacker gains access to a user’s account. Proper access management allows you to limit a user’s access to only those resources they need for their own work. So, if a hacker obtains the credentials of a non-administrative user’s account, they won’t be able to do much damage.

Approaches like zero-trust, continuous adaptive trust, and just-in-time privileged access management (JIT PAM) allow you to establish a secure system to limit user access without interrupting employee workflow.

5. Manually approve access to sensitive resources

Since hackers will often try to log in to a user account many times from the same IP address, it’s a good idea to maintain a whitelist of user IP addresses and deny access to all unknown connections. However, whitelisting IP addresses won’t work well for remote users who commonly connect to the organization’s network from personal devices and in different locations.

Instead, you can enforce manual login approval to provide access to sensitive resources. Each time a remote or in-house employee needs access, they send a request to the security officer and specify the reason for access.

6. Monitor all activity within your network

Monitoring both user and entity activity within your network helps to detect credential stuffing, lateral movement, repetitive access requests, and other indicators of a brute force attack. You can establish monitoring in two ways: by tracking events in the network or by keeping an eye on user activity.

7. Educate your employees

Employees can be the strongest or the weakest link in your cybersecurity defense, so it’s in your best interest to educate them. Regular security awareness training sessions can help employees:

• Understand the importance of strong passwords
• Learn how to use password managers
• Remember the basic principles of cyber hygiene
• Recognize common types of hacking attempts, including brute force and social engineering attacks

8. Implement passwordless authentication

Brute force attacks are built on the idea of guessing a user’s password. Without passwords, there’s simply nothing to guess. Therefore, you don’t have to devote time and resources to figuring out how to stop brute force attacks. This insight has led to the idea of passwordless authentication, and today many companies are trying to implement it with modern security technologies.

Passwordless authentication is an authentication method that substitutes passwords with some other authentication token. It can be implemented in the form of:

• MFA that requests a biometric scan and ownership confirmation
• A picture, pattern, or hardware token instead of a password
• Voice, face, or gesture recognition
• A combination of a user’s geolocation and network address

as well as other methods.

Implementing passwordless authentication technology can prevent brute force attacks and reduce friction between users and administrators. But it will probably require you to significantly rework your security system through trial and error before you figure out the best way to use it.

Protecting your organization from brute force attacks with Syteca

Syteca is an insider risk management platform with numerous features that enable effective brute force attack protection. In particular, Syteca offers:

• Workforce password management

Syteca provides a secure vault for storing workforce credentials, making it easier and safer for your employees to use strong passwords when accessing corporate resources. It provides password checkout, remote password rotation, and military-grade encryption. Syteca also allows your staff to create and safely share business credentials in a couple of clicks.

• Two-factor authentication (2FA)

Syteca allows you to double-check a user’s identity with a code phrase sent to a verified mobile device. You can enforce two-factor authentication for regular, privileged, and remote employees as well as third parties.

• Access management

Syteca can help you securely manage employee and third-party access to your organization’s endpoints. The platform’s PAM features include time-based access restrictions, access request and approval workflow, and ticket-based user access validation. Thus, even if a malicious actor breaks through by brute forcing, Syteca minimizes the potential damage.

• User activity monitoring

Syteca can help you improve visibility within your network with its continuous monitoring, on-screen activity recording, and real-time user activity alerting functionalities. You can adjust the monitoring, recording, and alerting processes depending on your needs to enable swift detection of a brute force attack.

Conclusion

Hackers can take advantage of simple passwords and weak access protection measures in your organization to brute force their way into your network.

Use the best practices described in this article to detect and prevent brute force attacks and enhance your overall security posture. These security measures, coupled with Syteca’s robust user activity monitoring, access management, and incident response capabilities, can help you substantially reduce the likelihood of unauthorized access to your organization’s critical assets.