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The Dropbox hack is real

troyhunt.com

331–340 of 557 posts

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#331
post #109

Make sure you sign yourself up for something like https://haveibeenpwned.com if you haven't already. Sometimes being timely in responding to leaks can make a big difference on any further leaks.

Wow, thanks for this. I just found out that my email address was breached 3 times, while only one company sent an email informing me of the breach.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use anything after a + character with Gmail. E.g. myaddress+service1@gmail.com will go to your inbox and you can filter on it.

But not every website out there allows you to enter this as a valid email address. My earlier hypothesis was that this was on purpose, to make sure you don't use a filter on any email they might send. But these days I'm tending to think it's just a bad regexp on their side.

Even worse, some sites let you enter a plus address initially but that address will not work in some account management pages. I had an instance where I signed up to a pizza place with such an address and I could not unsubscribe or edit my mail preferences because of it.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#333
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely blows my mind that people are okay with giving their passwords (encrypted or not, see this very breach for why that's not always enough) to a 3rd party, but are not okay reusing a password somewhere. If 1Password ever got owned, the Internet would be severely fucked. And to stem the potential flood a bit, I realize there are plenty of good counterargument built up over the years to try and combat this g…

> It absolutely blows my mind that people are okay with giving their passwords (encrypted or not, see this very breach for why that's not always enough) to a 3rd party That sounds more like LastPass than 1Password, although I haven't looked at the new subscription offering. I don't give my passwords to 1Password.

You don't give your passwords to LastPass either, you give them encrypted random noise they can't do anything with.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#334
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot agree more, I do the same, and invite everyone else to do so. - Useful as a canary of which website has been breached - Useful as a canary of which website sold your details - and if your details are in the wild, you can stop the spam by deleting the address Credit cards should work the same way: a unique authorization code specific to this vendor or this transaction and useless to any other actor.

Is there a service (email host) that can give you "infinite email aliases"? (Yes, I know about the '+' in gmail, but I suspect the word is out on it)

mailhero.io lets you set a username, then anything sent to *.username@mailhero.io is forwarded to an e-mail you choose. It's only somewhat an e-mail host at the moment (added a few weeks ago), and it has stated that the hosting is only temporarily free, but if you already have a host this can give the feature without requiring any form of migration.

There was an HN discussion about it fairly recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781361

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#335
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1Password is well worth the money. It is well designed for both desktop and mobile and I am happy to pay for software that I use every day.

It absolutely blows my mind that people are okay with giving their passwords (encrypted or not, see this very breach for why that's not always enough) to a 3rd party, but are not okay reusing a password somewhere. If 1Password ever got owned, the Internet would be severely fucked. And to stem the potential flood a bit, I realize there are plenty of good counterargument built up over the years to try and combat this g…

A great example was the recent Opera browser sync hack. Everyone who uses it has to change ALL of their passwords everywhere. Password managers are a TERRIBLE idea, and it's kinda sad so many security researchers recommend them. Single point of failure is a really basic concept to understand.

Password reuse has been slightly overblown as a concern. Things like your Google, GitHub, TeamViewer, bank, etc. accounts should always be unique. But if someone hacks your password for the Engadget forums or something, does it matter that they can now log in to your Kotaku commenting account? REALLY? People talk about how they have hundreds of accounts and could never remember passwords for all of them, so need a password manager... but in reality, only a few of those accounts actually matter.

And you're better off leaving a piece of paper with passwords on it by your desk than using a password manager. The likelihood of a digital hack of a password manager is infinitely greater than the likelihood of someone breaking into your house to get your passwords (instead of like... just taking your TV).

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#336
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the website is so poorly designed, it leads to consumer-non-adoptability.

Indeed. I would really love to recommend Keepass, but their website is really ugly and makes the impression of a non-polished software - even though Keepass is absolute mature and fine. On the other hand, the PuTTY website is also everything but polished, but people have always been using it. Also, I suspect that most people will get it through the third-party site "www.putty.org" instead of the real PuTTY website, w…

You know what always gets me: PuTTY's website isn't served over HTTPS. That software everyone downloads to type all their firewall and router credentials into... is from a website not served over HTTPS. I see the download and signature links are, but if I could have this non-HTTPS website offer up different links to your web browser...

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#337
post #26

It was pretty obvious the dropbox hack was real several years ago, because lots of spam mail started arriving at my dropbox-unique email almost immediately after the breach. I changed my email to another unique address quickly back then. Unique-per-service email addresses work pretty well as a canary for breaches. Just make sure there is more uniqueness than just the service name to such addresses, or someone could s…

> Unique-per-service email addresses work pretty well as a canary for breaches I do this too, but it taught me everything is breached - the local ambulance service, the local computer store, the local car share, small businesses overseas that I've placed orders with. Some of the big names don't seem to be, which is lucky because otherwise I'd be wondering if it was the ISPs that had been breached. Either large chunks…

Back when I ran a mail server for a small business, I would see the spammers literally going through all the permutations of email addresses for a domain. In the logs you'd see:

failure to send to a@example.com

failure to send to b@example.com

...

failure to send to aa@example.com

etc.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#338
post #26

It was pretty obvious the dropbox hack was real several years ago, because lots of spam mail started arriving at my dropbox-unique email almost immediately after the breach. I changed my email to another unique address quickly back then. Unique-per-service email addresses work pretty well as a canary for breaches. Just make sure there is more uniqueness than just the service name to such addresses, or someone could s…

> On a side note, don't forget the time dropbox accepted ANY password during logins - http://www.cnet.com/news/dropbox-confirms-security-glitch-no... I've not forgotten, and this glitch has kept me from ever considering opening a Dropbox account. I'm surprised everyone else seems so forgiving of this massive screw up.

Haha for me it's the opposite. My password never works in Dropbox. I think it's because they don't support spaces in passwords, but they don't tell you when you change your password. They just accept the change and then you can't login.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#339
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While an offline password manager is inherently more secure, at some point you're either going to have to store the database on a cloud somewhere or worry about constantly keeping your databases in sync. Whether you store it in Dropbox/OneDrive/Google/etc. or use LastPass or another service, there's always going to be some risk. At present I still recommend LastPass because that way you can easily have everything syn…

Sure, with an offline password manager backups and synchronization are up to you, but even if you end up relying on cloud storage it's a different story; for instance, if you store your KeePass database on a Dropbox account and said Dropbox account gets breached, at least you know that unless there's a flaw in the encryption algorithm used by KeePass, the password database cannot be decrypted without the master passw…

There's really not much of a difference between syncing via Dropbox (or similar products) and cloud services with the following characteristics:

- Client-side encryption, meaning the service has no way to obtain your cleartext passwords (short of planting a backdoor, which is a vector that applies to all password managers).

- Full offline support, with the ability to export your database. This becomes relevant when the service is down, you're running into billing problems, or if the company goes out of business entirely.

- Availability of a native client (as opposed to web apps or extensions that act as a thin layer on top of a web app). Planting a backdoor that leaks your secrets is significantly harder when you also need to compromise the vendor's signing key, as opposed to just breaching their web server and adding some JS file.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#340
post #76
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot agree more, I do the same, and invite everyone else to do so. - Useful as a canary of which website has been breached - Useful as a canary of which website sold your details - and if your details are in the wild, you can stop the spam by deleting the address Credit cards should work the same way: a unique authorization code specific to this vendor or this transaction and useless to any other actor.

For credit cards, check out privacy.com I recently started using it, works great.

The fact that they publicize their 32-bit PGP fingerprint on their "security" page does not lend confidence in their security practices. Granted, there's also a link to the full PGP key, but the use of short fingerprints for any purpose should be verboten.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/17/pgp_admins_kill_shor...

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