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Lastpass Security Incident

blog.lastpass.com

341–350 of 587 posts

Re: Lastpass Security Incident

#341
post #226

I once started an interview process as a senior developer at Goto, the company behind LastPass. The contact was a first phone call where someone simply asked the number of experience I had in software development, Java programming, etc. I thought it was weird that basically all they got from the phone call was a bunch of numbers. The weirdest part tho what that they asked how many years of experience I had in... open…

Sounds silly, it’s a shame you didn’t get past the initial screen. It’s a process that has to be humored and you could have added a lot of value just by joining and then patching their hiring process.

When I was teaching in high school the deck-modelling thing is one that the kids come up with a lot especially when it came to doing their term project. I love the idea of being asked to implement a deck of cards using Java and inheritance! Here’s my implementation:

    SUITS = “♠♥♦♣”
    RANKS = “A23456789XJQK”
    deck = {(s, r) for s in SUITS for r in RANKS}
That’s about all you can commit to. Suits and ranks should probably be enums but we can start from these three lines and see how it goes.

Sorting? Depends on the game. Value? Depends on the game, and some games give the same card two values. Inheritance? Shared behavior depends on the game and is orthogonal to the card itself and often is dependent on game state as well as what card you have. Are we even playing a game, or is this just for rendering poker themed wallpaper? Calling it a “deck” is probably wrong. A deck is ordered and may have duplicates… it depends on the game! This is more of a pack than a deck.

It’s probably an amazing question for interviewing candidates in person to see how far they dig into the premise. As a take-home question, you could probably spend a minute on the code above and then an hour on implementing three different games. Maybe that was the original docx, but it didn’t sound like it.

Re: Lastpass Security Incident

#343

Just a reminder: if you are deciding to migrate from LastPass to something else, the password export malfunctions for unknown reasons. If you have memos, it could be a character in the memo. You must make sure the exported CSV file has everything!

Also if you try to export multiple times it will start spitting out exports full of duplicates. Only safe way is to export right after a fresh session login.

Wow. Is LastPass generally just really bad software? These bugs mentioned in this subthread make it sound like amateur hour.

Re: Lastpass Security Incident

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a blog post on HN a few days ago by someone who taught himself programming during covid and landed senior roles (multiple, simultaneously, by lying to the employers).

Do you have the link?

https://overemployed.com/ Not parent, but i think they are talking about this blog

Re: Lastpass Security Incident

#345

And here I am still just using KeePass. I feel like passwords can be way too sensitive to entrust to a third party. Even if you can verify that it is secure, you could still find yourself in a jam if their service goes down or is otherwise inaccessible. You don't have to worry about any of this with a KeePass database. You just have to deal with the very mild inconvenience of keeping your database synchronized across…

I haven't touched KeePass in a while(especially since it always had its quirks outside of Windows, being .NET), but KeePassXC which started as a merger of all the various patches to KeepassX(the QT implementation), has been very active. It has a more secure browser integration than the original had, although it's worth noting that nothing ever came close to the accuracy of 1Password when it comes to website quirk int…

KeePassXC is the desktop app I use across Windows, Linux, and Mac. It is fantastic. There are also multiple good apps for iOS, and I presume Android.

In my comment I used KeePass to refer to the database and not the specific application I use to manage it.

Re: Lastpass Security Incident

#346
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this is such a hacker solution. :) And as mentioned, already exists in many forms. Passwords and login credentials are dead. No user wants to deal with them. Password managers are a solution to somewhat sanely and securely manage this complexity, and not something that the average user wants to think about. In that sense, they don't improve security overall, and introduce many other issues (a centrali…

Considering that 99% of web app password authentication reduces to email authentication via ‘forgot password’, a good first step would be dropping the password and just using emailed tokens (or links) directly.

I hope not. Not only is this often frustratingly slow, it really complicates things for people who use devices where they don't receive email. Myself, I only receive email on my computer and one mobile device. I have several devices where having to click a link in an email to log into a site means annoying gyrations trying to transfer links from one device to the next. This is especially annoying when whatever mechanism you use to transfer the link does link previews and the login link is one-time-use. :D

Re: Lastpass Security Incident

#347
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the KeePassXC FAQ: "Additionally, you can use a key file filled with an arbitrary number of random bytes or a YubiKey to further enhance your master key" https://keepassxc.org/docs/#faq-keepassx

From the same FAQ: > So in a sense, it makes your password stronger, but technically it doesn't qualify as a separate second factor, since this is not an authentication scheme and also because the expected response doesn't change every time you try to decrypt your database. I'd argue that the biggest threat against a (non-cloud-synced) password manager is a local database compromise, and the Yubikey does not meaningf…

If an attacker compromises your local machine, they don’t need any password: they just wait for you to enter all required credentials and read the passwords when the database is unlocked.

Also, you omitted an important sentence at the end of the FAQ that you quoted. The response changes every time you save the database. Yubikey uses HMAC-SHA1, which is a hash of a shared key and a counter. The counter, and hence the response, changes when the file changes. That helps a lot, with constantly rotating the master key. It also adds 140 bits to an otherwise easy to remember password.

Re: Lastpass Security Incident

#348
post #20

Someday one of these password managers is going to be hacked wide open and it is NOT going to be pretty.

And all those people who called us stupid for critiquing the idea of trusting your logins with a third party will pretend they knew it all along.

Re: Lastpass Security Incident

#349
post #226

I once started an interview process as a senior developer at Goto, the company behind LastPass. The contact was a first phone call where someone simply asked the number of experience I had in software development, Java programming, etc. I thought it was weird that basically all they got from the phone call was a bunch of numbers. The weirdest part tho what that they asked how many years of experience I had in... open…

Sounds silly, it’s a shame you didn’t get past the initial screen. It’s a process that has to be humored and you could have added a lot of value just by joining and then patching their hiring process. When I was teaching in high school the deck-modelling thing is one that the kids come up with a lot especially when it came to doing their term project. I love the idea of being asked to implement a deck of cards using…

> It’s probably an amazing question for interviewing candidates in person to see how far they dig into the premise. As a take-home question, you could probably spend a minute on the code above and then an hour on implementing three different games. (Maybe that was the original docx, but it didn’t sound like it.)

I did a take home for Walmart Labs once and they completely ghosted me. What a complete waste of time.

Re: Lastpass Security Incident

#350

Just a reminder: if you are deciding to migrate from LastPass to something else, the password export malfunctions for unknown reasons. If you have memos, it could be a character in the memo. You must make sure the exported CSV file has everything!

Is there an api to fetch all the data instead?
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