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Plex: Important notice of a potential data breach

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 194 posts

Re: Plex: Important notice of a potential data breach

#31
post #15

I'm a long time Plex user, and I have not received this email. Not sure if I should be worried or if the breach has just affected a subset of users. I use random unique passwords for everything anyway, as long as no credit card details were taken it shouldn't be a big deal hopefully. I was able to log into the site now and no message was displayed at all. Edit: Not sure why I would be getting down-voted for this. Sec…

Likewise, I haven't got anything.

I haven't received anything either, and was able to log in without having to set a new password.

Re: Plex: Important notice of a potential data breach

#32
post #26

This disclosure is no where to be found on their website or blog, and it provides no timeline, no details about the attack, and no details about what data was accessible beyond "a limited subset of data that includes emails, usernames, and encrypted passwords". Very very frustrating. As of Aug 23 11:24PM PST, Password change page is sort of working, at times displaying error message "Internal Server Error. Something…

It appears the password change works fine if you deselect the "Sign out connected devices" box. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1562329358282285057

Mine worked fine with that checkbox on. However, I cannot get my home server to appear again, even after getting a new claim and restarting it.

Re: Plex: Important notice of a potential data breach

#33

I personally wish companies would encrypt email addresses in their database, this would at least help against SQL injection attacks and some others (e.g. attacker has only DB system access and not app server access), so it's more difficult for attackers to aggregate data on me. To me it feels very casual waving away the leak of email addresses and just give the usual "passwords were encrypted". But YMMV.

The difference between email and password is you can validate a password with a hash, but you can’t send an email to a hashed address. Their db may be encrypted at rest, but a hacker could still compromise a system that has the key in memory.

Encrypt the email in column, add hashed email in separated column. Email Sending would then be covered by a separated and "airgapped" system that holds the decryption key, if you need to send mail, you send the encrypted email address plus what you want to send there.

Now an attacker cannot get a hold of email addresses easily.

Re: Plex: Important notice of a potential data breach

#35

question: why use Plex over Kodi?

With Plex and Jellyfin, you set up a central server that will serve clients on all of your devices. So if you watch half of s2e3 on your tablet, then switch over to the living room TV, it will continue where you left off.

They also have clients for all major platforms and for web browsers, and can be accessed from outside of your home. I'm currently in Portugal, watching TV shows off my home machine in Germany via my phone or my Amazon Fire TV or my laptop.

It's much like having your own self-hosted Netflix.

Re: Plex: Important notice of a potential data breach

#36
post #18

I personally wish companies would encrypt email addresses in their database, this would at least help against SQL injection attacks and some others (e.g. attacker has only DB system access and not app server access), so it's more difficult for attackers to aggregate data on me. To me it feels very casual waving away the leak of email addresses and just give the usual "passwords were encrypted". But YMMV.

In the healthcare industry in USA, Personal Identification Information (PII)/Personal Health Information (PHI) needs to be encrypted at rest and in transit and is mandated by law. So, they are required to encrypt PII/PHI data fields. Some of those practices may be generally applied for non-healthcare settings as well.

To get nitpicky... (usual disclaimer, IANAL but I worked in health IT including heavy involvement in HIPAA topics earlier in my career) I don't think there's a requirement under HIPAA or HITECH to use encryption.

The relevant parts of HIPAA are the duty to not disclose PHI to unauthorized recipients and breach notification requirements if you do incorrectly disclose PHI (the HIPAA breach notification rule).

The magic of encryption is that HIPAA provides safe harbor if the data stolen/lost/intercepted was encrypted to certain standards. So if you lose an encrypted hard drive full of PHI, or someone breaks into your servers and steals encrypted data but not the decryption capability, then it's not considered a breach under HIPAA and you do not need to notify anyone.

Tons of PHI isn't stored encrypted at rest. Physical theft of the hard drive from the practice's back-end EHR database server hasn't generally been high priority on the HIPAA breach potential risk assessment list. But nearly all data in transit, on employee laptops, etc. will be encrypted, because that's where you want the safety net of the safe harbor provision.

Re: Plex: Important notice of a potential data breach

#37
post #27

If true, then this will probably reignite discussions around Plex requiring that you authenticate with their servers when using the service to view content that you're hosting on your own hardware. If anyone is curious, then alternatives like Jellyfin exist. It's a bit different and may not have all the features you need, but it works quite well in my experience.

Perhaps the most important thing about Jellyfin is that it's open source. I really wish the project received a little bit more love.

Has an app for the fire stick too which works really well

Re: Plex: Important notice of a potential data breach

#38
post #27

If true, then this will probably reignite discussions around Plex requiring that you authenticate with their servers when using the service to view content that you're hosting on your own hardware. If anyone is curious, then alternatives like Jellyfin exist. It's a bit different and may not have all the features you need, but it works quite well in my experience.

Perhaps the most important thing about Jellyfin is that it's open source. I really wish the project received a little bit more love.

They have done a great job, but ultimately I believe a tool like Go or Rust would work much better and the XML metadata format while standard is not very good. Would be nice to see YAML or even JSON. Kodi is my go to for the most part, but I will have to say Jellyfin is definitely more polished. It downloaded the transparent logo for the movie I was watching and displayed it so nicely when I started a movie. I remember Plex offering music themes when you were browsing a collection.. I wonder if Jellyfin does something similar already.

Re: Plex: Important notice of a potential data breach

#39
post #27

If true, then this will probably reignite discussions around Plex requiring that you authenticate with their servers when using the service to view content that you're hosting on your own hardware. If anyone is curious, then alternatives like Jellyfin exist. It's a bit different and may not have all the features you need, but it works quite well in my experience.

Perhaps the most important thing about Jellyfin is that it's open source. I really wish the project received a little bit more love.

I also want to bring into light that Jellyfin is not very secure either [1], its sadly not in a great place to replace Plex still.

1: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415

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