auziros:jeana-tahnk

Jeana has been in the tech industry for 15+ years, both as a communications professional and writer. As Director of Global Communications at Auth0, she works with her internal team and external agencies to amplify the company's visibility worldwide and establish its leadership in the identity industry. When she is not working, she can most likely be found on a field watching one of her three kids playing sports, or cleaning up after her one-year-old retriever who chews everything.

Senior Director, Global Communications

Jeana Tahnk

New feature blocks majority of malicious requests, saving enterprises critical time and resources



**BELLEVUE, Wash. &mdash; August 18, 2020 &mdash;** The [Auth0](https://auth0.com/) Identity Platform, a product unit within Okta, today launched [Bot Detection](https://auth0.com/blog/reducing-the-impact-of-credential-stuffing-attacks), a new security feature that reduces the effectiveness of a credential stuffing attack by as much as 85%, with minimal impact on user experience. Bot Detection is a powerful addition to the company’s expanding security portfolio, and works in tandem with Auth0 Breached Password Detection, Brute Force Protection, and Multi-factor Authentication, to provide extensive mitigation against a variety of sophisticated threats, including automated attacks, account takeovers, phishing attacks, and more.

Credential stuffing attacks often rely on stolen account credentials (username and password) from a previous data breach, and are used to gain unauthorized access to user accounts on another website. This is executed via large-scale bot-driven attacks against the login flow and is an increasingly pervasive problem for enterprises. Ongoing Auth0 customer analysis revealed the following: 

* Auth0 sees an average of 175,000 unique IP addresses that are deemed suspicious on a daily basis. 
* Threat actors can use as many as 65,000 IP addresses for a single attack.
* During an attack, credential stuffing can account for as much as 65% of the traffic to Auth0’s authentication service.
* During a credential stuffing attack, traffic for a particular website may surge as much as 180x the usual volume, with traffic related to the attack itself accounting for 90% of overall activity. 

Bot Detection correlates numerous data sources to identify and mitigate bot-driven attacks before login, and relies on a collection of risk signals and assessors that identify indicators of suspicious activity. This layered approach — also known as defense in depth — consists of multiple security capabilities, including Bot Detection, that effectively reduce the number of credential stuffing attempts and many other attacks. At a high level, Bot Detection monitors IP addresses for non-suspicious events, such as successful logins; suspicious events, such as numerous failed login attempts across multiple accounts; and IP reputation data, which is used to identify known threat actors. When suspicious traffic is detected, a CAPTCHA step is required to complete a login request — the system is designed to mitigate the majority of bot attacks targeting the login or registration flow. At launch, Auth0 will support customers using its [Universal Login](https://auth0.com/blog/introducing-the-new-auth0-universal-login-experience/) capabilities, with additional support for other experiences in the coming months. 

Automated attacks are growing more sophisticated each day, and these large-scale bots are designed to respond to any and all controls to evade detection. Auth0 found that threat actors can, and do, change their attack strategies in as little as five minutes to bypass a security control. More than [80% of companies](https://auth0.com/resources/whitepapers/credential-stuffing-attacks) state it is difficult to detect, fix, or remediate [credential stuffing attacks](https://auth0.com/blog/what-is-credential-stuffing/), which result in an average of more than $6 million a year in costs per company and can cause a significant impact on IT resources, account takeovers, and brand reputation. 

“We’ve seen an increase in the volume and sophistication of bot attacks over the last few years, and companies are investing more in their defenses,” said Matias Woloski, CTO and cofounder at Auth0. “Being at the front door of applications with a service that secures more than 4.5 billion login transactions per month, we have a unique vantage point for quickly identifying and blocking suspicious activity before any damage is done. This is what makes Bot Detection very effective at preventing account takeover and reducing the load on DevOps and SecOps teams.” 

More detailed information on credential stuffing can be found here: [Credential Stuffing Attacks: What Are They and How to Combat Them](https://auth0.com/resources/whitepapers/credential-stuffing-attacks) (whitepaper), and [Reducing the Impact of Credential Stuffing](https://auth0.com/blog/reducing-the-impact-of-credential-stuffing-attacks) (blog post). 

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### Media Contacts
Jeana Tahnk <br />
Auth0 Global Communications<br />
[press@auth0.com](mailto:press@auth0.com)<br />

Hannah Carroll<br />
Matter for Auth0<br />
[auth0@matternow.com](mailto:auth0@matternow.com)<br />


New Bot Detection Feature by Auth0 Reduces Effectiveness of Credential Stuffing Attacks by Up to 85%

antoniofuentes

Antonio is a Product Manager in charge of features and functions used by thousands of customers implementing identity systems to keep their users safe and prevent malicious activity.

Product Manager, Continuous Auth

Antonio Fuentes

How Auth0 uses risk signals to detect and help you manage scripted, high-volume attacks on your identity flows



## The Problem

Attacks on an identity infrastructure using stolen credentials are a difficult problem to solve. [Credential stuffing attacks](https://auth0.com/blog/what-is-credential-stuffing/) occur when a bad actor sends scripted, automated login attempts to an application or website in extremely high volumes, with the objective of gaining access to user accounts. This is an increasingly common problem: on any given day, up to 69% of login attempts on the Auth0 infrastructure are suspected to have originated from credential stuffing attacks. 

This type of attack can be quite sophisticated. Sometimes they come in the form of hundreds of thousands of login requests to a site in a short time window, at a very high velocity, and from a relatively small number of IP addresses from unusual locations. They can also come in the form of scripts that send traffic using tactics to dynamically evolve their velocity, location, and number of IP addresses to avoid detection.  

Generally, solving this problem involves a tradeoff between usability and security, in which user experience pays the price. Measures like multi-factor authentication (MFA) are effective in limiting the success rates for a script involved in a credential stuffing attack, but they also add friction for legitimate users. 

To tip the scale in favor of user experience, malicious bots and scripts need to be detected and rejected before a login call is even processed by the authentication server. Doing so enables you to limit the impact of credential stuffing attacks while delivering a better experience for the end user. 

## Bot Detection from Auth0

Auth0 is launching Bot Detection, the first in a series of features to detect credential stuffing attacks on the login flow. Once enabled, this feature will use a variety of signals to assess the likelihood that a login call originates from a scripted attack. If the risk assessment is high, a CAPTCHA step is inserted into the login flow. 

![Bot Detection](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/3Fs7MAvNuLZTFJ20QOSw6m/63bf1b065314dd2bea4a7451782dfb6b/bot-detection-anomaly)

Bot Detection will be supported at launch with Auth0’s Universal Login experience. For customers who have built more customized user experiences using native SDKs such as `lock.js` and mobile SDKs such as a `lock.Android` and `lock.swift`, Auth0 will support an exception scenario so that customers can recognize a risky call and take steps to render a CAPTCHA step on the screen. The feature will also support presenting CAPTCHA using a generic flow or a customer’s own Google reCAPTCHA.

<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/1sos7fOgZYGp148983HyH5/809ea54d105104de83c2e922fe22de7f/bot-captcha" alt="Bot Detection-1" width="396" height="602"/></td>
<td><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/1U3FsuEZ0rHL9kDNQv17J5/cb207f20b5eb8b676f1b2549866456dd/bot-captcha-2" alt="Bot Detection-2" width="382" height="735"/></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

## Mitigating Abuse with Auth0

Bot Detection will be the latest addition to Auth0’s collection of features designed to prevent abuse, including [Breached Password Detection](https://auth0.com/docs/anomaly-detection/breached-password-security), [Brute Force Protection](https://auth0.com/docs/anomaly-detection/brute-force-protection), and [MFA](https://auth0.com/docs/mfa). These features help customers mitigate the tradeoffs between security and usability without unnecessary compromises to user experience. 

## Learn More

* [Credential Stuffing Attacks: What They Are and How to Combat Them](https://auth0.com/resources/whitepapers/credential-stuffing-attacks)
* [The Anatomy of a Credential Stuffing Attack](https://auth0.com/resources/webinars/credential-stuffing-attack-webinar)

Auth0 is the first identity management platform for application builders, and the only identity solution needed for custom-built applications. With a mission to secure the world’s identities so innovators can innovate, Auth0 provides the simplicity, extensibility, and expertise to scale and protect identities in any application, for any audience. Auth0 secures more than 100 million logins each day, giving enterprises the confidence to deliver trusted and elegant digital experiences to their customers around the world.
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"credential-stuffing-attack"