this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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Cybersecurity

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I have a question for the hive mind: what is the point of this, exactly?

I mean, I understand the attempt to gain access, and I understand why 2fa codes can be valuable to attempt to phish but that's like, not the thing here.

They just spam dozens to hundreds of these (I'm showing over 400 in my inbox right now) but like, even if I WANTED to give these codes to the attacker, I have no damn clue who the dude in China that's doing this is.

I'm confused as to what they hope to gain by trying over and over and over every couple of hours because it feels like there's no upside to whomever is running this bot, but I probably have missed a memo on some TTP around this, heh.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

For the record you should probably change your password. That way they can’t even try.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Some Microsoft services don't ask for your password anymore, they just send you a code to your register email.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah it turns out that's what nonsense this is.

Worse, I sure as crap never opted into this, but at least you can turn it off.

What a stupid decision some product manager made.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

Not when that password is just an email...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

❤️ Passkeys.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

The thing that I have seen is while it looks like they are after MFA codes, those emails are a distraction from the actual account they are trying to take over, so be very careful when deleting the emails, there could be a legit email in there asking you to roll back an account change.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I've been getting these for an account even I can't get back into.

Gonna have to get real granular with my inbox filters to send them into the void...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Dosen't Microsoft rate limit the attempts? In that case ypu can just select a random number, the trie to brute force it until the code send is the one selected.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It doesn't seem all that limited; I'll get 4-5 in a burst, then nothing for a couple of hours or a day or so, then 4-5 more, and so on.

Been ongoing for a couple of months now, and given it's a random 6 digit number, I don't think they're even remotely doing enough attempts to try to brute force it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

If Microsoft accepts, let's say, 3 attempts per code send, they already tried 1200 numbers (per your 400 emails), it's still short to the 10**6 random attempts on average (supposing that the codes are entirely random). If you email is part of a list of a thousand, they already had tried more that a million and got access to some of them.