Page 159 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2025

Why You Can't Be Saved by Me Alone

IAM systems are essential, but they are not made to handle this issue.

• Although attackers can use AI to evade MFA prompts, IAM can enforce strong authentication.
• Although IAM can centralize identities, APIs and shadow apps introduce vulnerabilities.
• Although AI-driven bots produce noise that appears to be human logs, IAM offers audit logs.

IAM is reactive, which is a painful reality. Layered defenses and proactive detection are necessary for
credential stuffing.

How AI Enhances Credential Stuffing

Attackers use AI as a weapon in the following ways:

1. Behavioral Mimicry: By recording actual user sessions, bots teach machine learning models to
imitate mouse motions, geolocation switching, and typing rhythm.
2. Learning that Adapts: Bots use residential proxies to route if IPs are blocked; they learn from
unsuccessful login attempts. They target distinct accounts if MFA is activated.
3. Changes to Passwords: Passwords that have been stolen are transformed into dozens of
different variations by generative models ("Summer2023!" → "$umm3r2023!!").
4. Getting around CAPTCHAs: The majority of CAPTCHAs are broken at scale by computer vision
and LLM-powered solvers.
5. Abuse of APIs: Bots circumvent web defenses by directly exploiting login APIs.

Case Study: In order to evade fraud detection, a financial services company found that attackers were
utilizing reinforcement learning bots that modified login attempts in real time. Before the attack was
lessened, it took six months and a new bot defense solution.

Developing a Defense Outside of IAM

1. Feeds of Credential Intelligence

• Incorporate threat intelligence that keeps an eye on dark web dumps and sends out alerts when
user credentials show up.
• For instance, businesses that use these feeds proactively reset exposed accounts following the
LinkedIn leak.

2. AI-Powered Bot Detection

• Use anomaly detection at the edge (WAF/CDN), which examines behavioral patterns such as
device fingerprinting, velocity, and mouse movement entropy.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2025 Edition 159
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