Traces how credential stuffing works at the concept level: password reuse as the root cause, combo lists built from breach dumps, the one-to-three-percent success rate offset by scale, and why it is a different attack from brute force.
Traces the tooling and economics that turn a breach dump into validated accounts: combo lists and stealer logs, OpenBullet-style configs, residential proxy networks, CAPTCHA-solver farms, and the division of labor underneath.
Traces how stolen and generated card numbers get validated at scale: the BIN-enumeration pattern, the micro-authorization probe, the bot infrastructure behind it, and the merchant- and network-side signals that catch it.
How a side effect of password reuse became an industrialized attack: the term's 2011 coinage, the breach dumps that fed it, the Sentry MBA and OpenBullet toolchains, and the defenses that grew up around it.