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773M Password ‘Megabreach’ Is Years Old

krebsonsecurity.com

161–170 of 177 posts

Re: 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ Is Years Old

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasoning given is: if you're aware it's a bad idea, great! Don't do it. If you don't yet know it's a bad idea, and do it, you'll see how many places it has already been leaked, and hopefully start using different passwords, and a password manager ...

It trains average/non-IT people to enter their password on websites to “check”. If scammers start setting up mock websites that ask you to enter your password to see if your account was hacked, people will fall for it because they have been trained by white-hats that this is an acceptable practice.

You have to dig to get to this feature.

The consumer facing feature is entering your email address.

Re: 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ Is Years Old

#162
post #88

Anyone here recommend a good security key? Is YubiKey still the best option? I noticed that they don't have any usb-c + NFC options.

Fwiw I just received some solo keys after backing their kickstarter. Unfortunately the firmware doesn't yet support key storage, but it should be comming. I think it looks like an interesting alternative to nitrokey in the open source space. They have usba and usbc variants, and are working on nfc ("solo tap") variant:

https://solokeys.com/

https://github.com/solokeys/solo

https://www.amazon.com/Solo-Two-Factor-Authentication-USB-Tr...

https://solokeys.com/en/start/faq/

"Can I use Solo for OpenGPG or Ssh? Not yet

Can I use Solo to store passwords? Not yet."

Re: 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ Is Years Old

#163
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. And it's so easy to set up when you have your own domain, I'm somewhat surprised not more people are doing it. Oh well.

It would be cool if there was something like this built into a password manager

There is, it will save off whichever username you use when you sign up eg facebook@domain.com - works well for me.

Re: 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ Is Years Old

#164
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used KeePass and one issue I do take with it is the UX. Bitwarden and 1password feel like cohesive apps and have good integration with many platforms. For KeePass I felt uneasy about some of the ports of it. There's a lot of good ones on desktop, less so on mobile. Syncing is also a thing I prefer 1password and Bitwarden for. They both have cloud syncing by default. Some won't want that but I definitely do.

The problem I personally have with KeePass is sharing and that you are on your own for many things. You CAN make mistakes with KeePass. You pretty much can’t make mistakes with a service. I’ve set about 100 people up on LastPass including my mom. I recommend it as a very good thing normal people will actually use.

why is sharing a problem? You can put your password database anywhere as long as your master password is good.

Re: 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ Is Years Old

#165
post #18

Since a few weeks ago I receive spam emails threatening me with an old password I no longer use. I wonder if it's related to this collection. It starts with: > I am well aware [old password I think I swapped out everywhere, but definitely in all important places, when I started to use random keepass pws two years ago] is your pass words. Lets get straight to the point. None has compensated me to check about you. You…

I've received around a dozen of these, all with different bitcoin addresses. All of them came from a Linkedin breach a few years ago. (I know that because I use different email addresses and passwords on every site, and these all came to my Linkedin-associated address and claimed to have stolen my [unused for years] Linkedin password.)

Re: 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ Is Years Old

#166
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I was looking for USB+C + NFC, so I can use it with my Macbook + iPhone... having to buy two seems inconvenient.

Note that you will want to own at least two and enroll both of them to properly lock down a service so that it doesn't need some plan B. The reason is that obviously if it's locked down to a single U2F Security Key and that key breaks or is lost you're screwed. Google's programme aimed at high risk people (e.g. journalists covering government corruption) specifically aims to leave you in a position where so long as y…

Thanks that’s good advice. Is the idea your token is synced across both devices? Or you have two separate tokens that allow you to authenticate? I’ve only set up a mobile based authenticator per account before...

Re: 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ Is Years Old

#167
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the time I experimented with screen recording for self-analysis and productivity. It sometimes captured things I didn't want on video, but I forgot to turn off the recorder while I was deleting the footage. So I ended up with footage of me trying to cover up embarrassing footage.

Has anyone done this as part of a ‘presentation skills’ course? You record yourself giving your talk and then you play it back but sped up a little . Boy do those nervous ticks appear obvious at 2x. By the end you just want to scream out to yourself “stop touching your ear!”.

This was a requirement in a Speech course I took during community college. Each of my speeches was recorded while I gave it to the class. After each one, I had to watch the recording and write a short paper that analyzed the physical presentation that I gave including my ticks/mannerisms/etc.

Edit: We each brought in our own VHS tape (this was 2010-2011) on presentation day and https://www.svcc.edu/employees/directory/pa-fulfs/index.html would swap them in/out for each speech. Good memories... :)

Re: 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ Is Years Old

#168
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that you will want to own at least two and enroll both of them to properly lock down a service so that it doesn't need some plan B. The reason is that obviously if it's locked down to a single U2F Security Key and that key breaks or is lost you're screwed. Google's programme aimed at high risk people (e.g. journalists covering government corruption) specifically aims to leave you in a position where so long as y…

Thanks that’s good advice. Is the idea your token is synced across both devices? Or you have two separate tokens that allow you to authenticate? I’ve only set up a mobile based authenticator per account before...

Ordinary Security Keys can't be synchronised so to as to be interchangeable. A good U2F/ WebAuthn implementation lets you enroll several of them and use any each time you sign in. So yeah, separate tokens, any of them works.

It's pretty different from authenticator apps, it can be much more convenient (no trying to quickly type in six digit numbers) but it's kinda expensive for now.

Ordinary Security Keys only know how to do exactly one thing, prove that they're still the same Security Key that they were the last time. They can't even prove which one they are in particular (most can prove which model they are, because a bank or something might be like "Ooh, we like this technology but we insist you use Bank of America brand Keys..." but they don't even know like a "serial number" or anything). This is deliberate - it allows the strongest possible privacy guarantees while still delivering a useful security function. The Firefox implementation lets you pick "No" when sites ask which model it is - I always do, none of their bloody business, it's a Security Key, eat it.

When you "enroll" a Key the site gets back a "cookie" (not an HTTP cookie) that is only useful to identify that site to that Security Key; a Elliptic Curve public key; and a signature proving the Key knows the corresponding private key and was enrolling with this specific web site. The site puts those somewhere (presumably a database table) ready to use them when you log in subsequently.

When you need to log in, the site gets its list of all the keys you've enrolled and says "OK, here are the cookies for some keys you enrolled, prove you still have one". If you have one of these keys it can find its cookie among the set, and it knows the private key that goes with that cookie, so it can sign a new message saying "Hi, this is still me, signing in to $domain right $now" and the site verifies that with the public key.

In principle the Security Key could be keeping a big database of every site it has enrolled with and the cookies used versus private keys. In practice what it does is make a random new private key each time it enrolls, encrypt the private key and put the result in the cookie. Only it knows how to decrypt the cookie, so there's no danger from this approach.

Re: 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ Is Years Old

#169
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks that’s good advice. Is the idea your token is synced across both devices? Or you have two separate tokens that allow you to authenticate? I’ve only set up a mobile based authenticator per account before...

Ordinary Security Keys can't be synchronised so to as to be interchangeable. A good U2F/ WebAuthn implementation lets you enroll several of them and use any each time you sign in. So yeah, separate tokens, any of them works. It's pretty different from authenticator apps, it can be much more convenient (no trying to quickly type in six digit numbers) but it's kinda expensive for now. Ordinary Security Keys only know h…

Thanks, I'm going to buy more than one for backup and use the multi-key approach. Appreciate the long explanation. I've been meaning to set this up for years.

This should be standard practice taught to kids in school! Especially considering their whole life is digital now.

I saw that Linux's full disk encryption supports Yubikey as well as Gnome login screens which is neat.

Re: 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ Is Years Old

#170
post #44
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also it makes it easy to guess what other alias you would have used for another website. Short randomly generated hex is a much better solution.

There is a pretty cool keepass plugin [1] that generates randomly generated readable passwords based on a dictionary with definitions of nouns, verbs and adjectives and multiple patterns to create short sentences. Even if the dictionary and patterns are known by an attacker, this still has very good entropy on ~16 characters long sentences. For usernames you can easily just go down to the minimum (around 6-10). I fin…

Self-plug: passhole is a keepass CLI password manager that has this feature built in.

http://github.com/evidlo/passhole

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