CAPEC-2
Inducing Account Lockout
An attacker leverages the security functionality of the system aimed at thwarting potential attacks to launch a denial of service attack against a legitimate system user. Many systems, for instance, implement a password throttling mechanism that locks an account after a certain number of incorrect log in attempts. An attacker can leverage this throttling mechanism to lock a legitimate user out of their own account. The weakness that is being leveraged by an attacker is the very security feature that has been put in place to counteract attacks.
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Explain the attack pattern CAPEC-2: Inducing Account Lockout: how it unfolds, what it needs and how to prevent and detect it in my systems. Use https://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/2.html and https://cve.bz/cve/capec/2?via=ask-ai-copy, which lists recent CVEs with the weaknesses it exploits. Cite the sources.Opens a third-party assistant; its answer is its own, not cve.bz's. The prompt holds only this attack pattern's id and public links.
How the attack unfolds
Experiment
They probe what they found.
[Investigate account lockout behavior of system] Investigate the security features present in the system that may trigger an account lockout
3 techniques
- Analyze system documentation to find list of events that could potentially cause account lockout
- Obtain user account in system and attempt to lock it out by sending malformed or incorrect data repeatedly
- Determine another user's login ID, and attempt to brute force the password (or other credentials) for it a predetermined number of times, or until the system provides an indication that the account is locked out.
[Obtain list of user accounts to lock out] Generate a list of valid user accounts to lock out
3 techniques
- Obtain list of authorized users using another attack pattern, such as SQL Injection.
- Attempt to create accounts if possible; system should indicate if a user ID is already taken.
- Attempt to brute force user IDs if system reveals whether a given user ID is valid or not upon failed login attempts.
Exploit
They carry out the attack.
[Lock Out Accounts] Perform lockout procedure for all accounts that the attacker wants to lock out.
1 technique
- For each user ID to be locked out, perform the lockout procedure discovered in the first step.
Prerequisites
The system has a lockout mechanism.
An attacker must be able to reproduce behavior that would result in an account being locked.
Skills required
- Low skill
No programming skills or computer knowledge is needed. An attacker can easily use this attack pattern following the Execution Flow above.
Resources required
Computer with access to the login portion of the target system
Consequences
| Impact | Affects | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Resource Consumption | Availability | Denial of Service |
Mitigations
Implement intelligent password throttling mechanisms such as those which take IP address into account, in addition to the login name.
When implementing security features, consider how they can be misused and made to turn on themselves.
Weaknesses it exploits
- CWE-645 Overly Restrictive Account Lockout Mechanism
Recent CVEs with these weaknesses
- 5.3CVE-2026-35161
Dell PowerScale InsightIQ, versions 5.2.0 through 6.3.0, contains an Overly Restrictive Account Lockout Mechanism vulnerability. An unauthenticated attacker with remote access could potentially exploit this vulnerability, leading to Denial…
- 6.9CVE-2026-105866
Payload is a free and open source headless content management system. In versions before 3.90.0 and canary versions before 4.0.0-canary.34, an unauthenticated attacker who knows an account email address or username can abuse the account lo…
- 7.1CVE-2026-53982
Cap-go Console < 12.28.2 contains a denial-of-service vulnerability in its account deletion flow that allows an attacker to block authentication and onboarding functions by triggering account deletion while a device identifier is linked to…
- 7.5CVE-2026-25907
Dell PowerScale OneFS, version 9.13.0.0, contains an overly restrictive account lockout mechanism vulnerability. An unauthenticated attacker with remote access could potentially exploit this vulnerability, leading to denial of service.
- 5.3CVE-2025-5241
Overly Restrictive Account Lockout Mechanism vulnerability in Mitsubishi Electric Corporation MELSEC iQ-F Series allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to lockout legitimate users for a certain period by repeatedly attempting to login wi…
- 5.3CVE-2025-31947
Mattermost versions 10.6.x <= 10.6.1, 10.5.x <= 10.5.2, 10.4.x <= 10.4.4, 9.11.x <= 9.11.11 fail to lockout LDAP users following repeated login failures, which allows attackers to lock external LDAP accounts through repeated login failures…
- 6.3CVE-2024-37028
BIG-IP Next Central Manager may allow an attacker to lock out an account that has never been logged in. Note: Software versions which have reached End of Technical Support (EoTS) are not evaluated.
- 5.3CVE-2024-1722
A flaw was found in Keycloak. In certain conditions, this issue may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to block other accounts from logging in.
The newest records naming one of them. Each weakness's page lists them all.
Related attack patterns
- Part of
- CAPEC-212 Functionality Misuse
Examples
A famous example of this type an attack is the eBay attack. eBay always displays the user id of the highest b…
A famous example of this type an attack is the eBay attack. eBay always displays the user id of the highest bidder. In the final minutes of the auction, one of the bidders could try to log in as the highest bidder three times. After three incorrect log in attempts, eBay password throttling would kick in and lock out the highest bidder's account for some time. An attacker could then make their own bid and their victim would not have a chance to place the counter bid because they would be locked out. Thus an attacker could win the auction.
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