Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in • Hacker News Board

Re: Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in

#11

Post by jrockway » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 6:41 AM UTC

eekfuh wrote: post #6

266 emails whose domain end with .gov Very interesting.

Interesting that people only have a work account, or interesting that people who work for the government also slack off at work?

.gov is not just Obama and super-secret crytpo scientists. It's also the person who makes sure that every form they send out has an OMB Control Number.

Re: Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in

#12

Post by jamesjyu » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 6:41 AM UTC

dholowiski wrote: post #7

Thats great, thanks. I was relieved to not find my email in the list, although I could swear I've commented on gawker sites.

You probably used Facebook Connect.

This, btw, is a great example of when using a trusted 3rd party login is a big win.

Re: Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in

#13

Post by fellowniusmonk » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 6:42 AM UTC

Thank goodness I always use mailinator for junk like that.

Re: Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in

#14

Post by bradgessler » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 6:43 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #9

Fuck. What the fuck did I even need a Gawker account for? (Thanks for making this. I was going to download the torrent, but assumed that I did not ever visit their site, much less make an account. Wrong!)

You needed it if you commented on a post.

Re: Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in

#15

Post by jrockway » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 6:44 AM UTC

bradgessler wrote: post #14

jrockway wrote: post #9

Fuck. What the fuck did I even need a Gawker account for? (Thanks for making this. I was going to download the torrent, but assumed that I did not ever visit their site, much less make an account. Wrong!)

You needed it if you commented on a post.

Why would I do that? :)

Re: Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in

#16

Post by ABrandt » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 6:44 AM UTC

For some reason every md5 from this spreadsheet I try to decrypt, I get nothing. I'm using online tools like md5decrypter.com to do this. Am I missing something?

Re: Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in

#17

Post by ThePengwin » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 6:50 AM UTC

jamesjyu wrote: post #12

dholowiski wrote: post #7

Thats great, thanks. I was relieved to not find my email in the list, although I could swear I've commented on gawker sites.

You probably used Facebook Connect. This, btw, is a great example of when using a trusted 3rd party login is a big win.

Still, it's annoying when they can turn around and use such a login to spam things to another account.

sadly, I'm on the list, and it was an account i was banned from posting with about 2 years ago. I wish I could have deleted it.

Re: Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in

#18

Post by mahmud » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 6:56 AM UTC

Warning: logging into any of the compromised Gawker accounts might result in exposure to the inane life details of a Gawker reader!

Re: Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in

#19

Post by ThePengwin » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 6:57 AM UTC

ABrandt wrote: post #16

For some reason every md5 from this spreadsheet I try to decrypt, I get nothing. I'm using online tools like md5decrypter.com to do this. Am I missing something?

an MD5 hash is a one-way encryption, you cant reverse an MD5 hash to reveal what creates it. The quickest way to decrypt an MD5 hash is if someone calculates and stores all the possible combinations and then you look up to find them (known as rainbow tables), otherwise you just have to use brute force. Even so, the returned value could be different again, as there is only so many combinations that md5 can make (although for something as long as a password or email address, thats highly unlikely).

md5decrypter would just be a big database of tested strings and their MD5 hash,

Re: Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in

#20

Post by aneesh » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 6:57 AM UTC

ABrandt wrote: post #16

For some reason every md5 from this spreadsheet I try to decrypt, I get nothing. I'm using online tools like md5decrypter.com to do this. Am I missing something?

md5 is a hash function, and hash functions are designed to have two properties:

1) they are hiding. You (theoretically) can't reverse the function by any method other than brute-force.

2) they are *binding. You (theoretically) can't find any other input that hashes to the same output by any method other than brute-force.

Any tool that "decrypts" md5 hashes most likely does so by generating what is called a rainbow table -- a giant list of many possible inputs, and the hashes they generate. If you look at the spreadsheet and find a hash from your rainbow table, voila, you know what it came from. To make it harder to use rainbow tables, any security-conscious site will "salt" the passwords before hashing them, by adding a random string prefix. The point is for the random "salt" to be different for each password you are hashing, so a standard (unsalted) rainbow table won't work, and further, the same rainbow table won't work for every password.

(md5 itself has been shown to be vulnerable to collision attacks, which is why I said "theoretically")