Live data from Hacker News

A decade of Have I Been Pwned

troyhunt.com

171–180 of 181 posts

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#171
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides 2FA, rate limiting your login endpoint (both by IP address and username) is a much more robust protection against this attack. Especially if you include temporary bans (e.g. “20 failed login attempts with the same IP, and/or same username, in the past minute = 15 minute ban for that IP and/or username”). A lot of API gateways, K8s ingresses, etc. make this dead simple, and if not it’s also super easy to add w…

Rate limiting definitely helps against credential stuffing in the form of trying a bunch of common passwords against random accounts. But there's also "stuffing" with known breached username+password combinations – in which case it still helps, but I don't think as much? In the latter the attack is much more likely to succeed and there's a much smaller number of values being attempted, so the threshold of detection +…

Yeah, I do think it's worth doing both :) As well as at least making 2FA an option for your users - 2FA is the ultimate defence to most of these problems, but depending on the company/use case, not everyone is willing to make it mandatory, it does tend to be a lot more annoying to users. Things like failed login rate limits, minimum password length/complexity, and banning known breached logins is less intrusive to the user, and still pretty good defence when combined, though not as good as 2FA.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#172

Anybody been in more than 20 data breeches? All my stuff's been locked down with a password manager/2fa so I'm not worried, but having been on the internet for ages it's pretty funny at this point.

I appear to be up to 47 now.

The last time this was asked on HN (Feb 2018) I had 13 breaches and appeared in one “paste” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465030

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#173
post #89
post #76

I have memories of this site providing me with an excellent experience. Now it's just a cash-grab, asking for $169.50/year just to see 100 breached accounts! I use unique email addresses (breach canaries) on every website to detect when sites leak my data. When I tried to search for my domain results with a previous domain ownership verification, I got hit with this error: "In order to search a domain with any more t…

You’re doing a weird thing (running your own email domain), doing an even weirder thing (using a different address per site), and then doing an even more weirder thing (scanning your personal domain for breaches) and your supposition is that very specific use case is a cash cow for Troy Hunt? Come on.

It is preferred practice, not a weird thing, to have a dedicated domain and a different address per site for anyone involved in online security research.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#174

> Not to mention all the other weird variations including haveibeenburned.com, haveigotpwned.com, haveibeenrekt.com and after someone made the suggestion following the revelation that PornHub follows me, haveibeenfucked.com That is honestly pretty hilarious of a side effect of media fame!

It just proves that rules of the internet work. If it exists, there's a porn version of it.

Most online innovations were because of porn

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#175

Blackmail scammers have been using pwned password databases to craft some pretty convincing phishing emails ("I have installed RAT on your system and have been watching you through your webcam, proof I hacked you: -- send $1800 of BTC to this address and don't go to the police. Maybe use a password manager next time."). Do people get caught in these scams? I assume most get blocked by spam filters. I've only noticed…

The Pwned Passwords lookup returns just the number of breaches without any hashes or plaintext passwords. This would not make such an attack possible.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#176

No matter what anyone says, I am not going to type my password into a site called “Pwned Passwords” lol

The k-anonymity API makes it such that the password doesn't have to be sent to HIBP, but the first 5 characters of its SHA1 hash.

This returns a list of possible suffixes which can be checked for the actual password to see how many have been breached.

For example, a search for "abc" with the hash "a9993e3...89d" becomes:

`curl -s https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/A9993 | grep -i e364706816aba3e25717850c26c9cd0d89d`

which returns `E364706816ABA3E25717850C26C9CD0D89D:226273` indicating that the password has been seen 226,273 times

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#177
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be like comparing HN to Facebook, they are both technically operating social media sites but I don't think anyone would argue they are doing so at the same scale. HIBP ultimately is a hobby project that was really good at bringing the publics attention to the problem and booting Troy's social profile.

How many governments, password managers, web browsers, and law enforcement agencies does one need to be partnered with to transcend "hobby project" territory?

> transcend "hobby project" territory?

What happens if Troy gets hit by a bus tomorrow?

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#178
post #175

Blackmail scammers have been using pwned password databases to craft some pretty convincing phishing emails ("I have installed RAT on your system and have been watching you through your webcam, proof I hacked you: -- send $1800 of BTC to this address and don't go to the police. Maybe use a password manager next time."). Do people get caught in these scams? I assume most get blocked by spam filters. I've only noticed…

The Pwned Passwords lookup returns just the number of breaches without any hashes or plaintext passwords. This would not make such an attack possible.

That’s good to know. So they’re probably using old dumps.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#179
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many governments, password managers, web browsers, and law enforcement agencies does one need to be partnered with to transcend "hobby project" territory?

> transcend "hobby project" territory? What happens if Troy gets hit by a bus tomorrow?

I think you are implying that the presence or lack of a continuity plan is what determines whether something is a hobby project or not.

And I think that's an extremely silly way to determine if something is a hobby project or not.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#180
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides legal, I think it's important to realize that there is a very emotional response to discovering that your password is not good. I know a company that started doing quarterly brute-forcing of passwords as a security check and the reaction to finding out that your password is not strong enough is....all sorts of emotions. If you have a 10-12 character password that may have been strong at one point but now is n…

When a 12 character gets bruteforced, my initial reaction is to blame the system for allowing so many password attempts! Like imagine how many failed attempts must've happened for a 12 character password to get bruteforced. Alarms should have been raised way before it became an issue.

The password doesn't get brute forced via an API. The threat model would be more like your salted and hashed passwords got exported and now they can be brute forced. A 12 character password in the DB can be brute forced in seconds or minutes. If your password is strong it will take years or millenia.

That's what haveibeenpwned.com is about. It tells you if your email is in one of these database lists out in the wild. If it is, assume your password will eventually be discovered.

Post reply on HN