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Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

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Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#161

Post by jsjohnst »

Endy wrote: post #142
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a Yahoo account entirely to use a Yahoo email list; I used to have it for Yahoo chat, but I haven't used that in years. So I ignored the hack a few months ago. I also never got notified that I was vulnerable. Just now I tried to log in to see if my password had been invalidated. Nope. It was my old insecure "pattern-based" password (myprefixYAHOO) that I use nowhere any more. Probably short enough to have brute…

It's more that there's more then 1B accounts out there - remember that this isn't just "yahoo.com" that got affected, it's Yahoo, YMail, RocketMail, yahoo.co.jp (a HUGE community btw), and several others which all fall under the "Yahoo accounts" umbrella. Not every account was hacked by any means; terrifyingly, the number of accounts isn't nearly what you'd expect as a percentage of "Yahoo accounts".

Yahoo! Japan is separate from Yahoo! "worldwide". They actually run separate parallel infrastructure for many things, so I highly doubt YJP was part of the one billion accounts.

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#162

Post by duskwuff »

funnyfacts365 wrote: post #143
yuhong wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MD5 collisions are probably not important for passwords.

Care to explain? The hashes are what is compared so it seems it's important.

The existence of crafted collisions -- being able to create a pair of M1 and M2 such that MD5(M1) = MD5(M2) -- is primarily relevant to situations where MD5 is being used as a signature algorithm, such as in certificate issuance. In these applications, being able to generate a pair of documents with the same hash is catastrophic.

Being able to generate a pair of passwords that are treated as equal, on the other hand, is useless from a security perspective. It's a neat party trick, but it's not dangerous.

Now, if there were a preimage attack -- being able to take MD5(M1) and come up with a M2 such that MD5(M2) = MD5(M1) -- that'd be a much bigger deal, and it'd break MD5 password hashing wide open. But nobody's done that yet.

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#163

Post by Endy »

johansch wrote: post #81
bobbles wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It occurred in 2013

..and it took them three years to find and report it?

More likely report than find. From what I've seen of their current disclosure policies, and what execs have written on Y!Answers and such, they find the problem, they figure out who did it and how, and then after they've figured out how to fix it, they alert the userbase and the public - in that order.

Also, please do remember that we're getting into a different leadership team now at Yahoo; previously they were absolutely convinced that disclosure and alarmism were one and the same - and that any perceived weakness in the Yahoo Mail product would drive people to GMail.

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#164

Post by huskyr »

cimi_ wrote: post #101
ausjke wrote: post #24

I'm speechless. More and more are migrating to cloud these days, I expect more and more epidemic leakage will come. I host everything myself except for email, which is always a headache but contains more private info than all others I manage combined. Maybe it is time to run a small email server again but it is easily said than done, gosh please give me something like a working PGP or whatever for safe emails(PGP is…

> PGP is dying from what I read... Can you please provide some references for this? What are the alternatives?

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/12/op-ed-im-giving-up-o...

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#165

Post by Arubis »

Fittingly, attempting to change my password to a 32-character random string generated by 1Password returns an error that the password "cannot contain my email or username", regardless of the contents of that random string (I tried several).

It does, however, _happily_ accept `passwordpassword` and cheerily move along to confirming that my recovery email account from 2003 is still valid.

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#167

Post by ldiracdelta »

cimi_ wrote: post #101
ausjke wrote: post #24

I'm speechless. More and more are migrating to cloud these days, I expect more and more epidemic leakage will come. I host everything myself except for email, which is always a headache but contains more private info than all others I manage combined. Maybe it is time to run a small email server again but it is easily said than done, gosh please give me something like a working PGP or whatever for safe emails(PGP is…

> PGP is dying from what I read... Can you please provide some references for this? What are the alternatives?

Consider "Engineering Security", by Peter Gutmann: https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/book.pdf

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#168

Post by golf1052 »

fencepost wrote: post #88
serf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

honest question: if you're going to the extent of already using a password manager, why isn't every site getting a unique password?

In my case, it's because I still have some very old accounts in there. Accounts that predate not only this password manager (LastPass) but the previous one (KeePass) and which in fact go all the way back to something that started with "Yet Another (YA)" back on a Palm device. I really ought to go through and do some janitorial work in there, but some of those are for sites that actually still exist and for which thos…

I recently did this after I found a password manager that works with the devices I use. Took me a few hours to remember and track down all the accounts I use. Managed to get close to 70 accounts and even then I missed some. I think it was worth it though.

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#169

Post by kuschku »

camus2 wrote: post #20
kuschku wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> Sure, SHA1, scrypt or bcrypt with salt were already common back then, but it's an entirely different story than if they had used it today. Not an excuse, this is Yahoo, not a PHP shop in India doing some low budget contracting.They should have a top of the line security team enforcing the most recent secure practices. Furthermore I got no email from Yahoo telling me that my account may have been hacked. Both incomp…

> How can you come up with that argument in good faith ?

Let's say I've seen far worse in 2016, from companies storing far more sensitive data.

Like a bank, with no 2FA support, emailing me my plaintext password after clicking "Password forgotten", in 2016.

This story is problematic, but I'd be grateful if that bank would implement even the same stuff as Yahoo.

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#170

Post by manarth »

agf wrote: post #91
ubercore wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by a password that can't be reasonably brute forced? EDIT: To clarify, I mean specifically with md5. I'm by no means an expert, just curious because I had considered md5 so broken that this comment caught my attention.

If it's a password so long and complex it wouldn't be in any rainbow table computable in reasonable time. While MD5 can be computed quickly, there is still a limit to how many you can compute -- and there are an infinite number of possible passwords if they aren't length limited.

Rainbow tables are attacks against secure algorithms.

MD5 is recognised as an insecure algorithm: given a known hash, there are multiple possible passwords that would resolve to the same hash, therefore appearing to be the correct password.

With MD5, it's not necessary to compute an infinite number of possible passwords, and it is possible that, given a particular hash, a collision can be found within a reasonable time.

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