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43M passwords hacked in Last.fm breach

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Re: 43M passwords hacked in Last.fm breach

#151

123456 is actually a /fantastic/ password if you don't care what happens to the account. If you aren't going to the trouble of using a password manager, and the account doesn't mean much to you, then using weak passwords like this rather than your "good" password is a great idea. Save the entropy for your email and bank accounts.

123456 is literally in the top 10 list of worst passwords. You might as well not have any password at all. I agree that your banks and sensitive logins should have the better passwords, but you can have a decent password, it be memorable, and it still do its job on services you don't care as much about.

Re: 43M passwords hacked in Last.fm breach

#153
post #53

Regular reminder that new users in general don't care at all about the security of your site. Most of your signups are not going to generate and store a secure password "just to try you out", as evidenced by the most common password here "123456". If you force people to signup to try your site/app, many (most?) of them are going to use a crap password. If you're _lucky_ that'll be 123456, and not their email/facebook…

This SO MUCH. I can't stand when I get an email, from some service that I haven't used in 10 years and that I have no recollection of actually signing up for, saying "Oh sorry we had a hackings. You need to change your password."

This happened with Yahoo's weird online publishing service thing. I don't even remember the name of it but one of my passwords was in their service and, at the time, I was using the same password everywhere. By the time I got the "Oh we got hacked" email, my twitter account was compromised as well as a few other sites. I didn't even remember signing up for their service let alone having an account.

I feel like some sort of regular clean out should also be standard. If I haven't looked at your site in 5 years, why would my account still be available? I know there are situations where that could cause problems but I'd rather lose an account for (random forum that I signed up for in 2008) than possibly have a breech that could, somehow, lead to my information getting stolen...

Re: 43M passwords hacked in Last.fm breach

#154

Question about password best practices. Our site just went through pen testing, as part of auditing for PCI compliance. One thing we got dinged on was that we don't keep a password history, so that the user can't revert to their previous password. The tester's report said, "This, in turn, results in users utilizing a single password for a long period of time, which may result in password disclosure" It seems to me th…

It is a risk trade-off: letting the user reuse passwords used in the last X months is seen as less risky than storing the last 12 passwords (assuming the user is made to cycle their password monthly) if you are storing the credentials securely (if anything is plain or reversible, you need to fix that ASAP).

Having 12 strongly salted+hashed password strings is not going to help an attacker much compared to having 1, even if you use the same salt (though I've not doe the maths myself, you'll need to ask a cryto expert for actual risk figures).

You could of course use a different salt per stored password instead of per user, to mitigate this completely.

Remember that password reuse risk flows both ways: if they reuse the password in your application and your application is well written with regard to securely storing credentials, they may be reusing the same password in another application that is less secure so you are more at the mercy of the password data from elsewhere that is storing things plain.

Re: 43M passwords hacked in Last.fm breach

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the Dropbox hack for example, the reason they got hacked is because one of their employees reused a password, presumably from another site that got hacked. So that's one vector, where every time a site gets hacked, people using weak passwords (and reusing them) create the risk of future hacks. But more generally, exposing your account credentials allows others to impersonate you and potentially scam others, expo…

Got it, I certainly disagree and don't think the 41.000.000 last.fm users (whose passwords were cracked in two hours) should receive a substantial fine. I don't think there's a whole lot of precedence for this type of legislation either; what you're suggesting requires at least two other crimes to be committed by someone else (before someone else would potentially be at risk due to the user's bad password choice) - i…

> How would they prove the integrity of the data leaks?

Most jurisdictions already have security breach notification laws. If you're already required to report data loss to customers and/or the government, then at that point I don't think it's unreasonable to require companies to provide a copy of any leaked credentials since they should all be deactivated anyway.

> How would you prove that the password is reused, and how'd determine the size of the fine?

If companies were required to turn over credentials that had been breached, then this would be determined from the entire set of breached credentials.

> Does it matter if the password is strong, but reused and one of those services stores it in plain text and is hacked?

Sure, that's exactly why you're not supposed to ever reuse passwords even if they're strong.

> Would it be legal to use a weak password for a service if the hashing algorithm is strong, or just as long as the service isn't hacked and the data leaked?

I think there should be some minimum entropy level that's required regardless of the hashing algorithm. E.g. given that passwords can be automatically generated and stored, there is zero reason ever to use a password that's less than 30 characters of completely random characters.

> what you're suggesting requires at least two other crimes to be committed

The fact that these crimes are interconnected is why such a law is needed in the first place. And all these attacks are automated, so if you're reusing your last.fm password on Facebook and it takes ten minutes to brute force your last.fm password, then your Facebook account is going to potentially be pwned in ten minutes and 1 second.

If there were some benefit to having weak passwords then that would be one thing, but the way I see it it's just people creating a national security risk out of pure laziness.

Re: 43M passwords hacked in Last.fm breach

#156

New passwords must: Be at least six characters long Contain one or more numbers Include at least one of the following special characters: !"#$%&'()*+,-./:; ?@[\]^_`{|}~, or a space There's no way I'll remember a last.fm password like that! :(

You can't remember kFourLetterNameOfYourCat + "1!"?

Re: 43M passwords hacked in Last.fm breach

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it, I certainly disagree and don't think the 41.000.000 last.fm users (whose passwords were cracked in two hours) should receive a substantial fine. I don't think there's a whole lot of precedence for this type of legislation either; what you're suggesting requires at least two other crimes to be committed by someone else (before someone else would potentially be at risk due to the user's bad password choice) - i…

> How would they prove the integrity of the data leaks? Most jurisdictions already have security breach notification laws. If you're already required to report data loss to customers and/or the government, then at that point I don't think it's unreasonable to require companies to provide a copy of any leaked credentials since they should all be deactivated anyway. > How would you prove that the password is reused, an…

This is some serious Gulag Archipelago shit you're laying down here manbro.

Re: 43M passwords hacked in Last.fm breach

#158
post #121
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really a shame that we haven't solved this problem yet as an industry. I was thinking we could build a general purpose version of "Magic Links" for logging in, where the format of the email is well-defined, and the user's browser is able to receive these messages on their behalf through some form of integration. You could imagine a webmail provider offering some kind of polling or websocket API for listening for…

The problem is twofold: - whatever solution we come up with needs enough market force to push adoption - whoever gets to own "single sign on" owns the world. This is why there was so much backlash against Microsoft Passport all those years ago. Personally I'd favour some sort of hardware token, and we're very slowly moving in that direction with U2F.

Good points. I'm not proposing a single owner, but rather a federated protocol where sign-in operates over email with each person's mailbox provider. The hope is that each mailbox provider will provide the sign-in.

Re: 43M passwords hacked in Last.fm breach

#159

The tragicomic part is how they enforcing password complexity: Your password is not strong enough. New passwords must: Be at least six characters long Contain one or more numbers Include at least one of the following special characters: !"#$%&'()*+,-./:; ?@[\]^_`{|}~, or a space So password efZeLmur3ivio4t7 is not safe enough to be used by last.fm and they use md5 without salt to protect it?

A password that follows that "security scheme" is pass1! , which KeePass 2 reports as having a quality of 18 bits. efZeLmur3ivio4t7 , an illegal password, has a quality of 86 bits. Whoever was responsible for that decision should be fired. Either implement a real password strength algorithm based on entropy, or don't implement any except maybe minimum length.

not just fired, but shot dead :-)

Re: 43M passwords hacked in Last.fm breach

#160
post #7
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the bulk of the users signed before that date. [0] Last.fm is one of my favorite sites. Sad that is dying :( 0. rough heuristic: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=last.fm Edit: If anyone wants to add me on last.fm here is my profile! http://www.last.fm/user/joer14

How is Last.fm one of your favorite sites after that horrible redesign that erased tons of user-generated content?

I should said "it was" one of my favorite sites. The redesign is awful. They killed the neighbors feature which was really fun.
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