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Evernote hacked

blog.evernote.com

11–20 of 220 posts

Re: Evernote hacked

#11
The following blog post is also being sent to all Evernote users as an email communication.

Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service.

As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset. Please read below for details and instructions.

In our security investigation, we have found no evidence that any of the content you store in Evernote was accessed, changed or lost. We also have no evidence that any payment information for Evernote Premium or Evernote Business customers was accessed.

The investigation has shown, however, that the individual(s) responsible were able to gain access to Evernote user information, which includes usernames, email addresses associated with Evernote accounts and encrypted passwords. Even though this information was accessed, the passwords stored by Evernote are protected by one-way encryption. (In technical terms, they are hashed and salted.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography) ))

While our password encryption measures are robust, we are taking additional steps to ensure that your personal data remains secure. This means that, in an abundance of caution, we are requiring all users to reset their Evernote account passwords. Please create a new password by signing into your account on evernote.com(https://www.evernote.com/Login.action).

After signing in, you will be prompted to enter your new password. Once you have reset your password on evernote.com, you will need to enter this new password in other Evernote apps that you use. We are also releasing updates to several of our apps to make the password change process easier, so please check for updates over the next several hours.

As recent events with other large services have demonstrated, this type of activity is becoming more common. We take our responsibility to keep your data safe very seriously, and we’re constantly enhancing the security of our service infrastructure to protect Evernote and your content.

There are also several important steps that you can take to ensure that your data on any site, including Evernote, is secure:

Avoid using simple passwords based on dictionary words Never use the same password on multiple sites or services Never click on ‘reset password’ requests in emails — instead go directly to the service Thank you for taking the time to read this. We apologize for the annoyance of having to change your password, but, ultimately, we believe this simple step will result in a more secure Evernote experience. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Evernote Support(http://evernote.com/support).

The Evernote team

Re: Evernote hacked

#12
post #3

I've never really understood the security model for Evernote. It's "an exocortex" -- your personal notes, which are likely to be more security sensitive than general documents, email, etc. And yet they have even less security than Dropbox, themselves not exactly an exemplar of robust security. They've got competent people operating the service; it's just not well designed for security.

Yeah, Evernote really should have been zero-knowledge end-to-end encrypted. Recently https://crypton.io/ was released and my hope is that lots of new SaaS offerings will use it and that this will in the end force even the big names (Dropbox, 37signals, etc) to adopt real security.

> to adopt real security.

Won't happen until it's perceived that the lack of security is costing them money.

Re: Evernote hacked

#14
post #3

I've never really understood the security model for Evernote. It's "an exocortex" -- your personal notes, which are likely to be more security sensitive than general documents, email, etc. And yet they have even less security than Dropbox, themselves not exactly an exemplar of robust security. They've got competent people operating the service; it's just not well designed for security.

Yeah, Evernote really should have been zero-knowledge end-to-end encrypted. Recently https://crypton.io/ was released and my hope is that lots of new SaaS offerings will use it and that this will in the end force even the big names (Dropbox, 37signals, etc) to adopt real security.

I'm not a technical person, but how would they be able to search and index the items if everything is encrypted?

Re: Evernote hacked

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Evernote really should have been zero-knowledge end-to-end encrypted. Recently https://crypton.io/ was released and my hope is that lots of new SaaS offerings will use it and that this will in the end force even the big names (Dropbox, 37signals, etc) to adopt real security.

I'm not a technical person, but how would they be able to search and index the items if everything is encrypted?

They wouldn't be able to do this on the server side. However their native iOS, Mac, Windows clients could just create&update the search index locally and sync the encrypted version. With HTML5 localStorage this also works in Web Apps.

Of course there's a tradeoff, but for me that's easily worth it.

Re: Evernote hacked

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a technical person, but how would they be able to search and index the items if everything is encrypted?

They wouldn't be able to do this on the server side. However their native iOS, Mac, Windows clients could just create&update the search index locally and sync the encrypted version. With HTML5 localStorage this also works in Web Apps. Of course there's a tradeoff, but for me that's easily worth it.

The "tradeoff" seems to be "make the server into a dumb store for encrypted data." At which point, you don't have Evernote (an API for fuzzy-matching clippings punted into it from various devices), you have Evernote (a set of fat client programs each of which must maintain an entire copy of the dataset--notably, stored necessarily alongside its own decryption key on the client side, increasing attack surface--and do manual synchronization) plus a POSS (Plain Old Storage Service, like S3.) The resultant workflow sounds like it would have more in common with several people trying to edit the same Word document over SMB, than with making web requests.

[EDIT: clarity about client-side encryption]

Re: Evernote hacked

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Evernote really should have been zero-knowledge end-to-end encrypted. Recently https://crypton.io/ was released and my hope is that lots of new SaaS offerings will use it and that this will in the end force even the big names (Dropbox, 37signals, etc) to adopt real security.

I'm not a technical person, but how would they be able to search and index the items if everything is encrypted?

You could build an index in the client (perhaps as documents are edited), store the encrypted search index, and then do the search locally.

You could also have some files server-searchable (and accessible via a web UI -- there would be a way to download a client each time with the web ui, in js, to do client side crypto in the browser, but that has its own security vulnerabilities).

You might have 3 tiers -- client side encrypted and non-searchable, client crypto and client searchable including a javascript client, and server-searchable (and thus encrypted only using keys held by Evernote, just as a way to keep drives from getting cleartext on them).

The trick would be educating users and making a clear UI for this.

Re: Evernote hacked

#18

I'm kind of annoyed they didn't send an email, just flagged my password. So I couldn't use the iphone/mac apps and had to login via the web interface to reset. Which I didn't know because they didn't send an email, just got an invalid password error. Their lack of encryption and lack of 2 factor auth just became a much bigger issue for me...

Seriously, who doesn't do 2fa for something like this in 2013? Or 2012, or even 2011?

Re: Evernote hacked

#19

The following blog post is also being sent to all Evernote users as an email communication. Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service. As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset. Please read below for details and inst…

"One-way encryption" is a peculiar choice of phrase.

Re: Evernote hacked

#20
post #6
post #2

whew, i was shocked when my evernote client asked me to enter my password because i did not recieve the e-mail. It seems like this was a precautious step as nothing was 'really' hacked, or was it?

Their blog is down now, but they did say that attacker had access to usernames and encrypted password but nothing else.

So the content within the accounts was safe then?
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