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The Dropbox hack is real

troyhunt.com

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Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#361
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are many sites with little exceptions like that. I think that their password filter allows the characters, but their backend input sanitization doesn't, so it cleans it up and inserts a transformed version of the pass without providing notification. I've found this happens particularly often with passwords with symbols like !, #, or ;.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#362
post #321
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a unique authorization code specific to this vendor or this transaction and useless to any other actor" Sounds a lot like a bitcoin address.

...except not traceable, works with people's payment systems, sends actual US dollars, and doesn't have a 5% chance of getting stolen.

That's an amazing system you just invented, I wish it existed :-)

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#363
post #40
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…

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.

I wish phone numbers could work this way. When my personal data gets leaked or sold, just revoke access to that particular token.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#364
Well, thank goodness I got robbed after 2012, which caused me to change all my passwords everywhere. Else I don't think I would've ever gotten around to changing my Dropbox password, as it's just a long string of randomness.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#365
post #358
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.

Also, LastPass uses a similar site, plus it's specific knowledge of your passwords (last time it was changed), to let you know if a password has been compromised. Not sure if 1Password does as well, but it seems like a fairly obvious feature to add.

It does.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#366
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unique-per-service email addresses sound indeed interesting. How did you set it up? I am a google apps customer and already have a few 20 aliases in there but having to go through their UI every time I sign up seems very tiresome. Can I create a wildcard email in the terms of service-*@bar.com being a alias of email foo@bar.com? Do you know of a non-selfhosted provider that is able to do that? /EDIT: Looks like fastm…

I used to use https://spamgourmet.com and was quite happy. You can create email addresses on the fly without doing anything in their UI: alias.number.account@spam gourmet.com. Alias is the per-site value, number is the count of emails you want to allow through before automatically routing the rest to /dev/null. I seem to recall an option to remove the numerical limit, too - once you trust the place you gave your addr…

Same here. It's free, it's incredibly easy to create new addresses, and so far (on the order of a decade) it's been trouble free for me. If you start getting spam any an address you just log in to spamgourmet, switch off the address and you're done. No send-this-plus-address filters to set up at your mail host, no subdomain tricks to fuss over, no need to create spam aliases on your Fastmail account. The only feature that I wish it had is the ability to view a log of where the spam was coming from for each address.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#367
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.

Re: credit cards, unless you insist on using debit cards for some reason, who cares if they are compromised. If someone steals my credit card, AMEX has a problem. I'll take reasonable care, but I'm not going to generate transaction specific numbers or whatever unless there is a strong incentive to do so.

Because it's annoying to constantly get new credit card numbers. You have to update all your autopays. You can't get a new credit card instantly. Being denied due to fraud is embarrassing. You may be out of the country and stuck with a non working credit card. It's another thing to deal with.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish that it was much easier to generate temporary credit card numbers for all transactions. Like upon entering real number it would generate one and swap it for you.

I believe that's pretty much what Apple Pay and the like do.

Correct. My android pay says "a virtual number ending in xxxx was used to make this purchase." It would be nice if it was a token instead of an actual credit card number. I have no idea how is implemented.

Re: The Dropbox hack is real

#370

Can someone in the know indicate how to BEST manage passwords for different services in a secure way in 2016? Should I be using password managers (à la 1Password, LastPassword and others), or use something like Keychain Access on Mac OS X (what are the Windows equivalents?), anything else? It's important to note that not everyone is well-educated on the matter, despite the fact that most people on HN are technical pe…

I’ve always been under the impression the most secure and (technically) simple solution is to use the local system, like Keychain Access.

I wrote a small program that generates a list of random passwords. I just open terminal and type password, then copy/paste one of the outputs and allow Keychain Access to remember it. I do this for every service, the only manual password I use is for my actual computer, which is rotated periodically. You’ll need to manually backup your keychain file though.

This isn’t a friendly solution for most people.

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