Learn how password spraying attacks bypass weak passwords & MFA. See real-world examples, detection tips & defenses.
Password spraying is a low-and-slow brute force attack where an attacker tries a small set of common passwords across many accounts to avoid account lockouts.
Why it matters in 2025: Identity attacks remain dominant across incidents, and spraying continues to succeed because many organizations still permit weak or reused passwords and do not enforce multi-factor authentication. Microsoft’s 2024 Digital Defense Report notes that identity attacks are overwhelmingly password based. Verizon’s 2025 DBIR again highlights stolen credentials as a leading factor in breaches.
An attacker picks a few likely choices such as a seasonal or company-themed common password, tries it once per user across a large username list, then rotates to the next guess after a delay to stay under failed login attempts thresholds.
CISA has reported nation-state actors using techniques like password spraying, sometimes paired with MFA “push bombing,” to compromise accounts and modify MFA settings for persistence.
Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team has similarly warned about sprays targeting cloud administrators. They note that actors prioritize roles like Global Administrator and Cloud App Administrator because those accounts can reset passwords, register OAuth apps, alter conditional access, and bypass logging controls.
Traditional brute force focuses on one account with many guesses, while spraying focuses on many accounts with a few guesses to sidestep account lockouts and failed login attempts alarms.
Spraying does not require leaked credentials, which is why it is so prevalent wherever weak yet policy-compliant passwords exist.
Microsoft reported that password spray attacks often succeed around one percent of the time per account, which is enough to regularly yield compromise at enterprise scale.
Detection relies on correlating many low-frequency failed login attempts across many users, often from shared or rotating IP ranges, rather than single-user spikes.
A successful password spraying attack can instantly give adversaries credentials that skirt perimeter controls, enabling email takeover, data exfiltration, internal reconnaissance, privilege escalation, and persistent unauthorized access.
Investigations routinely uncover additional movement following initial foothold, such as:
Combine strong passwords or passphrases with phishing-resistant MFA, disable legacy protocols that cannot enforce modern checks, enforce conditional access, and monitor for organization-wide failed login patterns.
Start by eliminating weak passwords, enforcing MFA, and instrumenting your IdP and SIEM to detect low-frequency, wide-scope failed login attempts that signal a spray.
Frontegg helps cut off password spraying at the front door by pairing strong password policy with built-in defenses like breached-password screening, phishing-resistant MFA, adaptive rate limiting, and configurable lockout rules. You can block legacy protocols, enforce step-up authentication for risky sign-ins, and surface clear audit trails.
Admin protections matter too. Frontegg supports granular roles, just-in-time elevation, and alerts on privileged logins so a single guessed password does not turn into tenant-wide access.
Just as important, Frontegg reduces developer toil. Teams can ship secure authentication without reinventing detection logic or custom controls, and product managers can own policy changes from the dashboard. That combination supports distributed ownership and customer autonomy while raising the bar against low-and-slow guessing attacks.
