Are the claims of deepfake and intimate knowledge of procedures based of the sole testimony of the employee who oopsed terribly? This is a novelisation of an events Retool needs to revise the basic security posture. There is no point in complicated technology if the warden just gives the key away.
When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
101–110 of 287 posts
Re: When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
#102Re: When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
#103Very sophisticated attack, I would bet most people would fall for this. I'm surprised Google encourages syncing the codes to the cloud... kind of defeats the purpose. I sync my TOTP between devices using an encrypted backup, even if someone got that file they could not use the codes. FIDO2 would go a long way to help with this issue. There is no code to share over the phone. FIDO2 can also detect the domain making th…
> I'm surprised Google encourages syncing the codes to the cloud... kind of defeats the purpose. Depends on what you think the purpose is. People talk about TOTP solving all sorts of problems, but in practise the only one it really solves for most setups is people choosing bad passwords or reusing passwords on other insecure sites. Pretty much every other threat model for it is wishful thinking. While i also think th…
The user can still put in an insecure password but uploading all your 2FA tokens to your primary email unencrypted is basically willingly putting all your eggs in one basket.
Re: When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
#104Very sophisticated attack, I would bet most people would fall for this. I'm surprised Google encourages syncing the codes to the cloud... kind of defeats the purpose. I sync my TOTP between devices using an encrypted backup, even if someone got that file they could not use the codes. FIDO2 would go a long way to help with this issue. There is no code to share over the phone. FIDO2 can also detect the domain making th…
What do you use to accomplish this?
Re: When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
#105Very sophisticated attack, I would bet most people would fall for this. I'm surprised Google encourages syncing the codes to the cloud... kind of defeats the purpose. I sync my TOTP between devices using an encrypted backup, even if someone got that file they could not use the codes. FIDO2 would go a long way to help with this issue. There is no code to share over the phone. FIDO2 can also detect the domain making th…
> Very sophisticated attack, I would bet most people would fall for this. No. If you think people at your company would fall for this, then IMO you have bad security training. The simple mantra of "Hang up, lookup, call back" ( https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/when-in-doubt-hang-up-lo... ) would have prevented this. Literally like 99% of social engineering attacks would be prevented this way. Seriously, make a lit…
If we look at the actual data, we have seen a reduction in employees who fall for phishing emails. Unfortunately we can’t really tell if it’s the training or if it’s the company story about all those million that got transferred out of the company when someone fell for a CEO phishing scam. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter considering how many people you can witness having the training videos run without sound (or anyone paying attention) when you walk around on the days of a new video.
The only way to really combat this isn’t with training and awareness it’s with better security tools. People are going to do stupid things when they are stressed out and it’s Thursday afternoon, so it’s better to make sure they at least need a MFA factor that can’t be hacked as easily as SMS, MFA spamming and so on.
Re: When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my company, such a communication would never come via a text, so that would be a red flag immediately. All such communications come via email, and we have pretty sophisticated vetting in place to ensure that no such "sketchy" emails even arrive in our inboxes in the first place. Additionally, we have a program in place which periodically "baits" us with fake phishing emails, so we're constantly on the lookout for…
After initially thinking it was a good idea, I've come to disagree pretty strongly with the idea of phish baiting employees. Telling employees not to click suspicious links is fine, but taking a step further to constantly "testing" them feels like it's placing an unfair burden on the employee. As this attack makes clear, well done targeted phishing can be pretty effective and hard for every employee to detect (and yo…
Re: When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my company, such a communication would never come via a text, so that would be a red flag immediately. All such communications come via email, and we have pretty sophisticated vetting in place to ensure that no such "sketchy" emails even arrive in our inboxes in the first place. Additionally, we have a program in place which periodically "baits" us with fake phishing emails, so we're constantly on the lookout for…
After initially thinking it was a good idea, I've come to disagree pretty strongly with the idea of phish baiting employees. Telling employees not to click suspicious links is fine, but taking a step further to constantly "testing" them feels like it's placing an unfair burden on the employee. As this attack makes clear, well done targeted phishing can be pretty effective and hard for every employee to detect (and yo…
What happened in the article — getting access to one person’s MFA one time — is not exactly a catastrophic event. It just happens, as with most security breaches, a bunch of things happened to line up together at one time to make intrusion possible. (And I skimmed the article but it sounded like the attacker didn’t get that much anyway, so it was not catastrophic.)
And things lining up rarely happens but it will happen enough times for there to be an article posted to Hacker News once in a while with someone saying that it’s possible to make it perfectly secure.
Re: When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
#108Very sophisticated attack, I would bet most people would fall for this. I'm surprised Google encourages syncing the codes to the cloud... kind of defeats the purpose. I sync my TOTP between devices using an encrypted backup, even if someone got that file they could not use the codes. FIDO2 would go a long way to help with this issue. There is no code to share over the phone. FIDO2 can also detect the domain making th…
> Very sophisticated attack, I would bet most people would fall for this. No. If you think people at your company would fall for this, then IMO you have bad security training. The simple mantra of "Hang up, lookup, call back" ( https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/when-in-doubt-hang-up-lo... ) would have prevented this. Literally like 99% of social engineering attacks would be prevented this way. Seriously, make a lit…
Re: When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. I appreciate the level of detail, but I don't appreciate Retool trying to shift the blame to Google, and only putting a blurb in the end about using FIDO2. They should have been using hardware keys years ago.
Hi, I'm sorry you felt that way. "Shifting blame to Google" is absolutely not our intention, and if you have any recommendations on how to make the blog post more clear, please do let me know. (We're happy to change it so it reads less like that.) I do agree that we should start using hardware keys (which we started last week). The goal of this blog post was to make clear to others that Google Authenticator (through…
FWIW, nearly every TOTP authenticator app I'm aware of supports some type of seed backup (e.g. Authy has a separate "backup password"). I actually like Google's solution here as long as the Workspace accounts are protected with a hardware key.
The only real lesson here is that you should have been using hardware keys.
Re: When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
#110Some startup, please make a product that uses AI to identify these obviously fake emails. Hello A, This is B. I was trying to reach out in regards to your [payroll system] being out of sync, which we need synced for Open Enrollment, but i wasn’t able to get ahold of you. Please let me know if you have a minute. Thanks You can also just visit https://retool.okta.com.[oauthv2.app]/authorize-client/xxx and I can double…