Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Brute force credentials protection
From: randy <marchany () VT EDU>
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2019 13:17:17 -0500
If you have strong password requirements, log failures/success and aren't bound by a specific regulation/law, IMHO, disable account lockouts. Why? IMHO, 1. Account lockouts are a 45 year solution to password guessing. In those days, Unix didn't have any password strength mechanisms. Later, tools like npasswd, passwd+ provided that capability and not until ~1992 with IBM's AIX 3.1 did any Unix system come with builtin password strength settings. Times have changed. 2. Strong password requirements, MFA, logging are more than adequate to deal with brute force attacks. 3. Account lockouts encourage DOS attacks by simply scripting multiple logins with dumb passwords. The goal, of course, is not to get access to your account but to deny you access to your account. This is nothing new. We were hit with such an attack in 1999 which forced to drive to the data center to deal with the issue. 4. Do you notify the offending site that you're being brute forced from them? While this can be tedious, it's also good neighbor policy. Of course, if a reg/law requires you to keep lockouts enabled, nothing you can do about that. Don't create a worse problem than the one you were trying to solve. :-) Just my .02. Randy Marchany VA Tech IT Security Office and Lab On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 1:05 PM Mike Dronen < mike.dronen () minnetonkaschools org> wrote:
Phil's article was quite interesting - we'll be discussing it at our weekly security meeting. While we've not had significant account lock-out issues in our environment - combined with our password policy it makes sense to slightly increase our failed attempt number...then again.... As for a perimeter tool, interesting as well - though it seems in EDU (student curiosity) we are protecting assets as much from the outside as the inside. I really appreciate all the insights!
Current thread:
- Brute force credentials protection Mike Dronen (Mar 04)
- Re: Brute force credentials protection Maud, Phil (Mar 05)
- Re: Brute force credentials protection Laverty, Patrick (Mar 05)
- Re: Brute force credentials protection Dexter Caldwell (Mar 05)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Brute force credentials protection Mike Dronen (Mar 05)
- Re: Brute force credentials protection randy (Mar 05)
- Re: Brute force credentials protection Brad Judy (Mar 05)
- Re: Brute force credentials protection Tom Horton (Mar 05)
- Re: Brute force credentials protection Greg Williams (Mar 06)
- Re: Brute force credentials protection randy (Mar 05)
- Re: Brute force credentials protection Francisco Chavez (Mar 05)
- Re: Brute force credentials protection Maud, Phil (Mar 05)