The Dropbox hack is real | Hacker News Reader

The Dropbox hack is real

troyhunt.com

1,313 pointsjoshschreuder539 comments

Make sure you sign yourself up for something like https://haveibeenpwned.com if you haven't already. Sometimes being timely in responding to leaks can make a big difference on any further leaks.

Can't upvote hard enough. Also, it is shocking how bad security is for all these games I've played over the years. The publishers seem to be the source of the vast majority of these leaks I've been caught in.

Thankfully the notification emails from this service are prompt and helpful (not to mention totally free).

Also note the guy that runs it is the one that wrote this article.

Wow, thanks for this. I just found out that my email address was breached 3 times, while only one company sent an email informing me of the breach.

Also, LastPass uses a similar site, plus it's specific knowledge of your passwords (last time it was changed), to let you know if a password has been compromised.

Not sure if 1Password does as well, but it seems like a fairly obvious feature to add.

It does.

1Password has a "Watchtower" feature that "identifies websites that are vulnerable to Heartbleed". Also under Security Audit are sections for Weak Passwords, Duplicate Passwords, and groupings of password ages (3+ years old, 1-3 years old, 6-12 months old for me). It does not appear to keep track of leaks/hacks.

https://watchtower.agilebits.com/

The problem with this feature seems to be that it thinks if the site reissues its certificate it means all passwords there were compromised. Which leads it to mark all old passwords as vulnerable, even if no breaches were actually reported for the site.

The certificate/password link is a guess since on their website they say to change the password starting with date that matches the date of certificate reissuance.

This seems to be related to Hearbleed, also it lists a site that didn't reissue certificate after Heartbleed as vulnerable too, and so for passwords there, seems to be regardless of age.

I am a long-time 1password user and have a lot of old passwords, so for me like 90% of passwords are listed as compromised, which I'm pretty sure is not the case.

I'm not sure how much I can trust the results of a site that claims an email address I only use for one site has been breached on sites and services I've never been to. However it's calculating if what you enter into the form appears in the leaked content sure gives a lot of false positives.

Which I suppose forces more awareness, but it doesn't instill a lot of confidence.

I think false positives like this are worth reporting upstream.

FWIW I was subscribed and didn't get anything until this most recent breach. Unfortunately GMail thought it was spam (speaking of false positives!).

A false positive from your perspective doesn't mean your email address isn't actually being used to sign up for things.

My primary personal email address is routinely used by a small handful of other real people (all strangers) for all sorts of things - college applications, car insurance, some address books think it belongs to a cousin who gets included in a lot of group threads about reunions and full of photos. I've found the families more difficult to unsubscribe from than the services, name+email associations spread like a virus. I routinely get alarming/misleading "Someone has your password!" security alerts from Google after someone tries to list my email as a backup account.

These little strings we use to identify ourselves can be typed by anyone, anywhere, bot or human. I wouldn't worry too much about false positives.

I wouldn't worry too much about false positives.

It's not that I'm worried, it's that it's a distraction. When the margin of error is high enough, it becomes less signal and more noise, which leads to either panic (spending all your time managing access credentials) or complacency (ignoring the indicators).

I have the same problem. Do you have any suggestions on how to handle such emails?

From https://haveibeenpwned.com/FAQs :

Why do I see my username as breached on a service I never signed up to? When you search for a username that is not an email address, you may see that name appear against breaches of sites you never signed up to. Usually this is simply due to someone else electing to use the same username as you usually do. Even when your username appears very unique, the simple fact that there are several billion internet users worldwide means there's a strong probability that most usernames have been used by other individuals at one time or another.

Its worth pointing out that other people can use your email address to create accounts. It's just a string of characters to type in.

They might not even know it's yours, like if your email is davidsmith@gmail and they fat-finger davidrsmith@gmail--boom, "you" now have an account.

Good services use double-opt-in to ensure that every account is actually tied to a correct and working email address. But not every service does this.

And even services that do use double opt-in would create a row in their database to note that a confirm email was sent out. If they never scrub those invite rows, "your" email address would still be in the DB when it's exfiltrated, even if the confirmation process was never completed.

Damn, thanks for this. It seems that I've actually been pwned at some point.

This was a strange way to find out that I have a Tumblr account.

Exactly my reaction.

Myspace and Adobe, neither of which is present in my password manager. Huh, no memory of those.

Lol, that was my initial thought too. Also, I obviously once had an account on vBulletin.

I think there was a time when it was once considered a vaguely normal blogging platform.

It's abnormal now?

Haha same here.

true... but unfortunately in this case (Dropbox) you would have gotten a notification about 4.5 years later ;-)

Fun fact: Have I Been Pwned neither salts nor hashes the creds which it stores on its website, potentially making itself an interesting target for hackers[0]

[0]: http://risky.biz/RB388

HIBP doesn't store passwords, it only stores usernames and email addresses.

apologies, s/"creds"/"user data"

How exactly do you expect them to send an email to an address they only have a hash of?

HIBP hosts only completely Public alread leaked data -- that's how they source their data

I think it should hash entered email client-side in JS to be more trustworthy. I am a bit worried about giving my various email addresses to some random site.

If you don't trust it to keep your email safe why would you trust it when it says it's going to hash your address?

Also it's an email address, not your credit card number.

Ironically, https://haveibeenpwned.com certificate is signed by StarCom, which is the same as WoSign https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411870 which means it basically trusts a known scammer to provide its security and one should not be giving this site any information you don't want to see in public.

Dropbox should absolutely be held to the flame for trying to downplay the severity of this. Their communication says 'This is purely a preventative measure', but if you had/have reused this password on any other sites (let's face it a huge proportion of non tech savvy people do this) then your entire online presence may be exposed.

Non tech savvy? Everyone does this. It's practical.

Sure most of us have a few passwords we reuse, but I know less than 5 people with truly unique passwords.

No, lots of people use password managers. You should try one.

I tried lastpass and it's been nothing but a pain in the arse. I still use it but I frickin' hate it.

If you're on a Mac, 1Password is a monumentally better experience.

Works great until it doesn't (multiple user profiles in your browser, HTTP auth, non-browser based stuff like VPNs).

Wouldn't multiple user profiles have their own extensions? If so, then just install the extension on that profile? IIRC 1Password was working on something related to that, so perhaps that has changed recently.

HTTP auth not working is a bit annoying, but it's not a massive deal when you can CMD+ALT+\ and copy-paste it. Same deal with non-browser based stuff.

I am on a Mac - I'll check out 1Password thanks

Why not just use keychain?

Two of the most compelling reasons are cross-browser support and a better cross-device experience. For example, viewing/editing Keychain password on an iPhone requires burrowing into the Settings app, whereas 1Password has an excellent app and extension.

Considering the consequences of password breaches, it's decidedly impractical. Password managers make it very easy to have unique passwords for all websites.

I don't even know any of my passwords.

Except the one to your password manager :)

Well, yes :)

This scares the crap out of me. I have to remember this one, super long and complex password for my password manager. If I ever accidentally paste it somewhere else, type it in somewhere or somehow it's leaked from the password manager then I am completely screwed. This one, tiny thing can completely turn my life upside down. For sites that require security questions those are easy to game so the only way to be secure is making up answers. So I wouldn't even be able to reset a large amount of very important passwords!

I wish we had a better alternative to passwords. Something that's actually good, solid, can't lose or forget. I get the feeling we won't have that until we can start implanting chips in ourselves.

You just immediately change the master password and delete previous versions of the database file ?

Not really. If someone gets into someone else's password manager they can easily get a copy of all usernames and passwords and, if they're quick enough, they can start resetting them / closing them / committing fraud.

So yeah change the password and delete previous versions is a good first step but everything else has already leaked to who knows where.

How about using the password manager to store security question answers too? It's mildly inconvenient because each site seems to require at least three, but then you wouldn't risk forgetting them and you could use random generated strings instead of having to make them up.

> How about using the password manager to store security question answers too?

That was my point: I use my password manager to store those security questions and answers but if someone got ahold of my password manager account I would be screwed because many sites require the answers to those questions to reset a password.

Make sure you turn on 2FA on your password manager. That should allay most of those fears. (Of course you would still change the password if it was leaked somehow.)

1Password doesn't have 2FA because it needs to decrypt your data. It does have a long "secret account" key that you need along with your password.

I use a pass phrase which is much easier to remember. I know the source material for my pass phrase so if I need to reconstruct my master password I go to the source material and convert it into the password by encoding the first letters, punctuation symbols and letters from the passphrase into the password.

I need to get into the habit of exporting my password list to plaintext csv and storing it in a safe or safe deposit box but I haven't disciplined myself for that yet.

I am worried about the ability for the 1Password database to be hacked if someone were able to get their hands on that.

> I am worried about the ability for the 1Password database to be hacked if someone were able to get their hands on that.

This is one among several reasons I don't go in for any "cloud" based syncing of password managers. I use keypass and sync the file with syncthing on LAN only mode.

It's really not so bad. I was reluctant to use 1password until being forced to by work, and discovered how wonderful having a password manager is.

First off, your passphrase should only be used for the password manager itself. So if you accidentally paste it on twitter, you just change your passphrase.

Secondly, you're way more easily fooled than a password manager. I don't know my passwords (they're generated), so to phish me you have to convince 1password as well. That means e.g the google open redirect bug on HN yesterday can't trick me with a fake password page on a different domain.

Third, it makes your passwords way easier to use on mobile. Most of the managers support whatever biometric integration your phone has nowadays, so rather than trying to type your 24 character alphanumeric symbol crap (or worse, a crappy password because you didn't want to make a good one on mobile) by hand you can just paste it in.

Lastly, it encourages you to actually use separate passwords for all your accounts. And when passwords get leaked, your manager can tell you which sites need new passwords.

In conclusion, password managers improve your internet security and experience immeasurably. Go buy 1password!

- satisfied 1password customer

I've been pretty happy not even knowing that. (YubiKey OpenPGP smart card + pass) It feels natural for my password manager to be just another thing I have to unlock with a physical key. The security concerns in practice are similar to that of my house keys, so there's pleasantly little mental overhead.

What happens to your password vault when the key suffers a malfunction? Or you lose or physically break it?

The key is backed up offline on digital media and paper. As with house and car keys, recovery from damage or loss is costly and inconvenient.

Thad great that you use a password manager but the majority of Internet users probably don't. What's your point? Either way you look at it if Dropbox was breeches then it's the responsible thing for them to do, to disclose.

my approach to this consists of 4 security "levels": 1. I have one "throw away" password for services I don't give a fuck about 2. 2 passwords for ordinary services (breach cannot cause any serious harm and I can reset the password over my e-mail) 3. 2 other passwords (pretty easy to memorise but almost impossible to guess) that I use for my school mail, IDE, other mail accounts 4. a unique password coupled with two factor auth I only use for my primary gmail - as long as I have ownership of that, I can restore access to basically any other account I use.

ad. 1: I find it a pretty good idea to also have a secondary junk mail for signing up to these services - just in case they give my e-mail to someone for spamming or get breached.

> as long as I have ownership of that, I can restore access to basically any other account I use

And therein lies the rub. Single point of failure for your whole intricate security setup.

I have the same problem.

How many people were using password managers in 2012? The impact is huge because leaks are silently retroactive. Unless you have captured and changed every single possible account you ever created with the leaked 2012 credentials (before or after), you might still have a lot of exposure.

I do not have the privileges to install a password manager on my work desktop PC. So that doesn't really work for me.

You probably shouldn't keep/use any personal passwords on your work computer anyway, but Keypass offers a portable executable that does not need to be installed.

I'd argue with a password manager it's more pragmatic to have a different password everywhere. I know two passwords and use my manager for everything.

Anyway, tech-savvy folk are more likely to setup their own file-sync server. It is the non-tech-savvy people who are the primary users of dropbox.

Not many tech-savvy people have time to set up and maintain a personal file sync service that works across their laptops, phones, and tablets.

Second bit of data for that claim. I use dropbox because I can't be waffled to set up my own dropbox nor do I have the free time even if I did want to.

Use an algorithmic password. Pick some easy to remember keyword, then work some of the letters of the website into the password so each site is unique. For example, your seed could be "horse", and your gmail password would be something like "hgomrasiel". I've been doing this for ten years and haven't forgotten a password yet. :)

I would like to do this, and I thought about using an algorithm that uses the domain name as the seed, however different sites have different password policies, and expiration times which would make this very difficult to manage in practice. I wish all sites support things like OpenID so I can have one central place to sign in with 3-factor authentication.

This comes up sometimes but I've found it to be less of an issue in practice than you might think. Occasionally I have to make an exception for my bank or gmail. If you do have to make a few variations at least it's only two or three passwords you have to remember instead of a different one for every login.

Genuinely curious, but what do you think the severity is?

Everything I know about it (this article included) places the Dropbox leak very low in my sense of severity.

The first time I saw the email I believed that Dropbox was taking it as a preventative measure because they thought they were breached -- not that they were breached. This information as hidden behind the link to more information in the email itself.

The severity stems from the unfortunate fact that a password leak retroactively, and silently, destroys your security across all sites that use the same or a similar password. Even if you started using the longest, randomised, two-factor-authenticated password system last year, all those forgotten or seemingly unimportant accounts are suddenly exposed.

Even when the exposed sites have minimal information or impact, minor information in aggregate adds up to a lot of danger for escalation and social engineering.

Now consider that there are huge swaths of people with the same password that they've use for email, banking, medicare, and everything else.

A proper response from Dropbox would be to explicitly and loudly inform every leaked email address (not just their current users) that they need to immediately change every password across any and all sites that might use the same leaked credentials.

Furthermore, Dropbox should set up a secure site with a unique link per email address that allows a user to key-in and check their memory against the exposed hash. I know that I have changed my password for Dropbox at least twice since 2012, but in 2012 I might have used an insecure password. Allowing me to figure it out before a nefarious party would allow me to better judge the potential personal impact.

That's true if your actual password is leaked, but as described in this post, it is very unlikely that actual passwords could be retrieved. Still a non-zero risk, but I could see a case that the severity of that risk is low.

The significantly greater issue imo is the leaking of email addresses and ensuing spam.

> That's true if your actual password is leaked, but as described in this post, it is very unlikely that actual passwords could be retrieved.

If I'm interpreting the hashcat screenshot correctly (I'm probably not, and even if I am it's probably skewed by init overhead or by not counting the final result) it looks like passwords can be attacked at ~6ms/dictionary attempt against the bcrypt passwords? While HIBP didn't get their hands on salts for the SHA1s, that doesn't mean they weren't breached as well.

I take it as a given that all high value dropbox accounts with a weak password in this breach will be pwnt.

Then again, it took until last week for anyone to try and grab my Minecraft account (successful email change, but successful resecure.) Given that HIBP knew about 1 of the 4 breaches I'm aware of for similarly weak passwords, I'm surprised it took this long... (I've since finally gotten off my ass and better secured all the legacy old terribly passworded accounts I can think of / were listed in my password database...)

I think the risk is a lot higher than described by this post or dropbox. There are nearly 70 million credentials, and email addresses actually contain a fair amount of heuristic information for an attacker. For example just filter down to addresses from hotmail or yahoo, and suddenly you have a list of credentials that are far more likely to be susceptible to a dictionary attack.

As far as what we know about these cryptosystems today, the passwords are no more accessible via this breach than they are when you send them over TLS. How is that severe at all?

did dropbox ever write up the details of how they were compromised and what else the attackers may have taken?

If not, there's nothing to suggest they didn't take other things.

It was pretty obvious the dropbox hack was real several years ago, because lots of spam mail started arriving at my dropbox-unique email almost immediately after the breach. I changed my email to another unique address quickly back then. Unique-per-service email addresses work pretty well as a canary for breaches. Just make sure there is more uniqueness than just the service name to such addresses, or someone could see your pattern and start spamming by guessing popular services.

On a side note, don't forget the time dropbox accepted ANY password during logins - http://www.cnet.com/news/dropbox-confirms-security-glitch-no...

I cannot agree more, I do the same, and invite everyone else to do so.

- Useful as a canary of which website has been breached

- Useful as a canary of which website sold your details

- and if your details are in the wild, you can stop the spam by deleting the address

Credit cards should work the same way: a unique authorization code specific to this vendor or this transaction and useless to any other actor.

> Credit cards should work the same way: a unique authorization code specific to this vendor or this transaction and useless to any other actor.

Isn't that how chip-and-pin works?

Except that the merchant still gets to see my credit card numbers (both sides). But it's how paypal works. The merchant only get an authorization code from paypal, and this code is useless to a hacker.

> the merchant still gets to see my credit card numbers (both sides)

With chip and pin? I don't think they do.

In the UK the numbers are printed on the receipt - part obfuscated on the customers copy, fully shown on retailer copy. So whilst the retailer may not touch the card they still get everything except the magic 3 digits.

Where I work you need the 3 digit security code and some address numbers (which you can make up) to properly process a transaction without the card.

Yes that's what I said - they don't see both sets of numbers.

Chip and PIN cards can support tokenization, which prevents the merchant (or anyone who has hacked the merchant) from seeing the card number, but they are not required to do so. I haven't seen any numbers on what fraction of cards use tokenization.

Something to keep in mind is that when chip and PIN was developed to combat credit card fraud it was card present fraud that was the big problem, either by someone using the stolen card itself at a brick and mortar merchant or making a counterfeit cart by writing the stolen number onto a blank card and using that at a brick and mortar merchant. Card not present fraud, where the number is used but not a card such as at an online merchant or a mail order merchant or telephone order merchant, was much less common.

Chip and pin made card present fraud much harder because it was much harder to obtain blank chip cards and the equipment to write a stolen number to them, and it made using an actual stolen card harder because of the PIN.

Chip and pin is not for online transactions, but in-store transactions. The merchant can see your credit card and would often manipulate it themselves.

I also use a Unique-per-service email address with Paypal, and I noticed that Paypal actually passes on that email address to the retailer when I pay with Paypal. I receive order confirmation emails (from those retailers) and quite a few unwanted newsletters to my unique paypal address now.

I have no idea what Paypal is trying to achieve by passing on this fairly personal piece of data. I always have to enter a separate email address with the retailer anyway, and because of this scheme, those two of course never match.

>>>I have no idea what Paypal is trying to achieve by passing on this fairly personal piece of data.

For years the Paypal API sucked, and even today their are many companies that do not have full integration with paypal, so this is a way to match payment records as for 99% of shoppers the email address for the order/account will match the paypal email address.

Paypal is great at that kind of unintentional disclosure. Six or eight years back, because I liked what she had to say, I used it to donate to someone who was then speaking under a pseudonym as a result of some fairly credible threats. Imagine my surprise when, in the process of transferring funds, Paypal showed me her full legal name and domicile address in the UI!

Of course I let her know about it, and I seem to recall her saying she'd addressed it successfully, but if she described how, I no longer remember. It quite astonished me that this was even a thing that could happen, though. One hopes it no longer does.

This sounds like she just set up her full name and address with paypal.

It's like her giving out her email address and it being firstname.lastname@gmail.com

I'm not sure the fault lies with the service.

It's been a while, so that might be true and I just don't remember, but it would be a surprising mistake to make for someone with a great deal of professional experience in operational security.

For credit cards, check out privacy.com

I recently started using it, works great.

This looks pretty cool, but seems like they are invite-only for now... Any chance you can drop an invite for a fellow HNer? :)

I've got an invite, contact me via the email in my HN profile and I'll send it over.

I just checked their sign up page, turns out they are only available in the US for now :(

But thanks anyway!

I found an early access code on their twitter: "NETTED". They posted that 1st August, so I'm not sure if it still works, but give it a shot!

Nifty. Discover Card offers this--or at least did when I was using it.

They got rid of it.

Wondering how this works. If one is using different number per transaction where they are getting so many free numbers?

Reading their footer, it says: "The Privacy Visa Card is issued by Customers Bank pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc."

So, it seems they have some kind of partnership with a bank, which is able to generate unlimited card numbers for them.

The fact that they publicize their 32-bit PGP fingerprint on their "security" page does not lend confidence in their security practices. Granted, there's also a link to the full PGP key, but the use of short fingerprints for any purpose should be verboten.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/17/pgp_admins_kill_shor...

geez, privacy.com, I wonder how much that domain cost.

I'm using a card from getfinal.com, which appears to be the same idea. So far so good, though it's not 100% disposable, I still have a plastic card who's number is no easier to change than a chase card.

Hey! I work at privacy.com - would love to get your thoughts on our product. Hit me up at bo@privacy.com for an invite if you're up for it. I'll tell you how we got the domain :).

Is there a service (email host) that can give you "infinite email aliases"?

(Yes, I know about the '+' in gmail, but I suspect the word is out on it)

https://dnt.abine.com/

A Small Orange does this cheerfully, even for the smallest shared hosting plan. You can then go into cPanel to configure a catch-all account for the domain you're using.

Biggest downside to ASO: you have to pay $7/yr extra on domain registrations to make them private. So I register with Hover and host with ASO.

I use Google Apps for Work on my domain, which lets me forward all email to any address on that domain to my inbox. That way I can use adobe@ryanplant.net, github@ryanplant.net, fitbit@ryanplant.net, etc.

I do this exact same trick and have been using it for years. It led to a couple of brief and somewhat awkward phone calls with local business owners when I asked them rather pointedly about them sharing my information with third parties.

I also take this one step further and have inbox rules to automatically send all promotional email (from sites I'm interested in) to the trash folder. If I want a coupon for a website I frequent, I'll just search my trash for the latest offers from that company. Google conveniently purges messages from the trash folder every 30 days or so, and I don't have to worry about a massive backlog of promos.

The problem is, I have yet to someone who accepts '+' in email address.

You can setup wildcard alias in fastmail (https://fastmail.com) and literally create addresses on the fly when signing up/sharing your email.

Fastmail has a really nice subdomains feature - I have an alias in fastmail of 'shop@mydomain.com'. Any email for XXX@shop.mydomain.com gets delivered to shop+XXX@mydomain.com. Better than catchall, because all the spam gets sent to JohnSmith@mydomain.com, which is dropped.

Wow, this is great feature, thanks for the tip! :)

But you can't delete that alias if you start receiving spam on it, can you?

Also like realemail+alias@gmail.com, this is really transparent to a spammer and gives away the real email.

The benefit it has is that the 'shop.' subdomain can't be guessed from the DNS records. I get a lot of spam to <randomname>@mydomain.com.

Of course, if someone sees my email address, they could certainly infer a new one. But I'll deal with that if and when I get singled out. I don't think the spammers often actually look at the millions of addresses they use.

If I start getting spam on a particular alias, I can set up filtering rules to delete them.

https://www.33mail.com

mailhero.io lets you set a username, then anything sent to *.username@mailhero.io is forwarded to an e-mail you choose. It's only somewhat an e-mail host at the moment (added a few weeks ago), and it has stated that the hosting is only temporarily free, but if you already have a host this can give the feature without requiring any form of migration.

There was an HN discussion about it fairly recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781361

Re: credit cards, unless you insist on using debit cards for some reason, who cares if they are compromised.

If someone steals my credit card, AMEX has a problem. I'll take reasonable care, but I'm not going to generate transaction specific numbers or whatever unless there is a strong incentive to do so.

I wish that it was much easier to generate temporary credit card numbers for all transactions. Like upon entering real number it would generate one and swap it for you.

I believe that's pretty much what Apple Pay and the like do.

Correct. My android pay says "a virtual number ending in xxxx was used to make this purchase." It would be nice if it was a token instead of an actual credit card number. I have no idea how is implemented.

Many had this feature (and Paypal for a while) but dropped it for some reason. My guess is they want to encourage subscription/repeat billing or some kind of fraud was rampant generating temporary numbers.

and AMEX passes the cost of that problem to all AMEX customers. You are still paying for it in the end.

how so? when a card is fraudulently used to make purchases, AmEx is not refunding you from their own pockets. they take back the money from the merchant it was fraudulently spent with (a chargeback). no loss at all on their side.

Which is then passed on to customers through slightly higher prices for goods.

But there is usually no way to opt out of this. Paying for it and not benefitting from it is lighting money on fire.

not really, prices are based on market demand. the market does not care about fraud issues and such.

whatever the theoretical rise in price would be (due to the fraud), don't you think the merchant would price things at that level in the first place to make extra profit, if they could?

Because it's annoying to constantly get new credit card numbers. You have to update all your autopays. You can't get a new credit card instantly. Being denied due to fraud is embarrassing. You may be out of the country and stuck with a non working credit card. It's another thing to deal with.

"a unique authorization code specific to this vendor or this transaction and useless to any other actor"

Sounds a lot like a bitcoin address.

...except not traceable, works with people's payment systems, sends actual US dollars, and doesn't have a 5% chance of getting stolen.

That's an amazing system you just invented, I wish it existed :-)

Fine, "not traceable by arbitrary people on the Internet".

I know the credit card company and everyone they share your data with can see your transactions, and that's a problem some may wish to avoid, but that is still a much smaller number of people who can see your transactions than Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not inherently include privacy.

I wish phone numbers could work this way. When my personal data gets leaked or sold, just revoke access to that particular token.

> Unique-per-service email addresses work pretty well as a canary for breaches

I do this too, but it taught me everything is breached - the local ambulance service, the local computer store, the local car share, small businesses overseas that I've placed orders with.

Some of the big names don't seem to be, which is lucky because otherwise I'd be wondering if it was the ISPs that had been breached. Either large chunks of SMTP routes are breached and picking up confirmation emails, or there's a giant iceberg of pwnage floating beneath the surface out of view.

> giant iceberg of pwnage floating beneath the surface out of view

Very poetic. I'd like to see this made into one of those motivational posters and hung in the office of every dev team nationwide.

The tip would be labelled "User Config", while the remaining behemoth, respectively: "DNS".

For the sysadmins out there ;)

I used to use unique middle addresses for magazine subscriptions, back when magazines were physical. I'd get credit offers with middle name "Byte". Consumer Reports used to include a false advertising hall of shame; I loved sending them an example sent to middle name "CR". They didn't use it, or even answer.

Or these places sell / give away your email address?

> it taught me everything is breached

More likely, sold. Every service that collects user data will get offers, and many can't resist the temptation.

Doesn't matter however, businesses that will sell you to the highest bidder (and in many cases, outside the US, illegally) can't be trusted to ever seriously invest in security. So if they aren't breached, they sooner or later will be.

Oddly enough I have had the opposite experience.

I have been running per-service emails for 10 years and wonder to myself if it is worth the bother as I can recall only one ever spreading.

That has been my experience as well. Only one alias in about 10 years ever got undeniably sold, and that was because the company went out of business and probably sold their entire portfolio.

My experience also is that there is pretty limited sharing, even among business partners. The worst was when the idiots at Aweber, the email marketing service, were hacked, and I had waves of spam coming in on many per domain emails. Six months later, Aweber was hacked again. Another wave.

Interesting. The plot thickens.

I don't have any fancy script to check these addresses - I have to go into my spam headers manually, and I've not done that for a long time. Perhaps there was a common issue a while ago that got patched. I'll have to check whether modern addresses are being spammed.

My favourite was the unique email I used for a Russian visa application. Either the consulate was ridden with malware, or they just sold my address.

Were you actually at a consulate? Most russian visas are (pre)processed by private companies.

In that case there are probably lots of travel companies who would buy that email list.

Consulate. Most Russian visas in Europe are processed by consular services, unless you need it done quick and/or from a remote place.

I got many Russian visas in my life in Europe and not once did i not use an intermediary. In Austria if you want to go thrrough the consulate you need to go through VHS first. In London VFS does it etc.

Shouldn't the word be"riddled with"?

I would be interested to know if you use a provider or host your own email.

I mention that because most of the ISP do have re-targeting efforts.

Also it would seem more likely that your email provider is breached as opposed to lots of other companies/servers.

How do you guys do this? IS there a service? Do you add na.melast@gmail Or do you create them on your own domain through the hosting company?

It's often called plus addressing. Quite a common feature in mail servers and mail services. MyName+<any-random-text> at gmail.com ends up in MyName's mailbox.

Doesn't that defeat the purpose? Surely anyone savvy enough to be dealing in black-market e-mail address lists is savvy enough to just remove everything after the + sign?

You never use the bare address. If it gets stripped then it gets binned.

What do 'bare address', 'stripped', and 'binned' mean in this context?

I don't agree with him, but he means you never use the email address without a "+service" in it.

Then, if the spammer strips (removes) that part, it gets sent to the trash (binned).

Works well until you encounter a service that thinks you can't have pluses in emails

Probably yes. The software I'm using supports configuring the character per domain, so I can use say . instead of +, so I could use myname.service@example.com which I assume would solve that.

You can use anything after a + character with Gmail.

E.g. myaddress+service1@gmail.com will go to your inbox and you can filter on it.

I'd image most shady spammers would know enough to filter out the +.

But not every website out there allows you to enter this as a valid email address.

My earlier hypothesis was that this was on purpose, to make sure you don't use a filter on any email they might send. But these days I'm tending to think it's just a bad regexp on their side.

Even worse, some sites let you enter a plus address initially but that address will not work in some account management pages. I had an instance where I signed up to a pizza place with such an address and I could not unsubscribe or edit my mail preferences because of it.

For example, overstock.com. Their registration page lets you use '+' address, but their login page forbids it.

If you are just starting to do this...it's very easy to forget you did it for a particular site.

"I can't log in and to boot your site says there is no account matching first.last@gmail.com. What kind of Mickey Mouse operation are you running here?"

"Sir, you are an idiot."

If you're using a password manager, that's a non-issue. And until we have something better than passwords, you really should be using one.

That's a solid point. I've generally avoided password managers because not knowing my (unique-per-service, strong) passwords makes me nervous in exactly the same way as not actually knowing the phone numbers of the most important N people in my life.

You'll get over that little hurdle once you realize that you can dump the anxiety of remembering a hundred password variants for different sites. And realistically speaking, you're probably not even using a hundred variants...or possibly even 10. If you're memorizing passwords, chances are your re-use frequency is nonzero.

What's important is to keep a backup of your password database in a few places. I use KeePass because I have no desire to keep passwords, encrypted or not, in a cloud service. I also don't find value in browser integration (possible attack vector?). I'm generally very DIY-inclined anyway. Your preferences may vary.

Thanks, I'll check into KeePass.

And trade it for the anxiety of your manager getting pwned.

I guess you aren't familiar with KeePass. If your KeePass database is pwnd, that means your box has been pwnd since the database is stored locally and not any cloud provider (unless YOU put it there). This means you have much bigger problems and is not a shortcoming of KeePass, itself.

As a full disclaimer, there are some issues with KeePass [1], but known issues are detailed in full by the project and are available for review.

1. http://keepass.info/help/kb/sec_issues.html

A hardcopy backup is also wise

I use a catch-all (*@mydomain.tld), and forward everything to the same place. Really simple and I can just make up email addresses on the fly when I need to, no config necessary, and harder to reverse than the +addresses trick.

I have a wildcard redirect so that <anything>@mydomain.com is forwarded to me. That way whenever I sign up for a service I just use, e.g., dropbox@mydomain.com.

I used that practice, and ended up selling the domain. Updating everything was an absolute nightmare as a result, and I couldn't make a simple request like, "please forward my one primary email address to me for the next few years." YMMV :)

Don't sell your domain until you've done a search for "to:*@example.com" :)

Personally, I worry much more about ad-hoc stalkers or angry people doing semi-manual digging. Such a scheme wouldn't help much. Does anyone know a convenient pipeline for managing (receiving, creating, disposing of etc) 3-rd party email accounts?

Have email on you own domain is risky unless you active manage it. Otherwise forget to renew your domain once, all your credentials are gone...

You definitely need to remember to renew it, but a yearly repeating event in your calendar should be sufficient. That's hardly "active management".

There is such a service: 33mail.com. I've just signed up.

For gmail, you can also put a period "." anywhere and it still works.

I use Fastmail, which provides very nice wildcard aliasing under a domain. *@mydomain goes to a single inbox. I can also create specific aliases such as foo@mydomain.

I also do unique aliases for each account I have. Few of them have been a source of spam.

I also have expiring subdomains. So I'm not using domain.com, but something like b2.domain.com. The rationale is that if I start receiving a lot of spam, I go through all the accounts I have, change all emails to use another subdomain like b3.domain.com, and then invalidate the old subdomain entirely. I haven't had to do that yet and my domain is several years old.

With two big exceptions: the email address I leave on my website and the email address I publish on my GitHub profile. These 2 have dedicated throwaway domains like throwaway283728@domain.com. Because you wouldn't believe how much spam I get from that GitHub profile, not just recruiters, but also get rich offers from princes in Nigeria and Viagra pills.

Back when I ran a mail server for a small business, I would see the spammers literally going through all the permutations of email addresses for a domain. In the logs you'd see:

failure to send to a@example.com

failure to send to b@example.com

...

failure to send to aa@example.com

etc.

> it taught me everything is breached

Everything is breached. From websites to software to hardware, I would estimate the majority of them can be/have been exploited by advanced hackers.

I'm awaiting the time when we all acknowledge that computers are fundamentally insecure.

I've been using unique-per-service email addresses quite a while, and I maintain a list[1] of all offenders that have leaked my PII.

1. https://gist.github.com/eligrey/5084991

Good idea.

I also actively watch my unique-per-service email addresses but have not started with a list, yet. Might be a good idea.

That's a much smaller list than I expected. I don't differentiate between those that sold and those that ignore unsubscribe (and a few that just have very contrived unsubscribe systems), but I have over a hundred per-service emails attached to disabled accounts (as aliases) to block them forever.

One that stands out in my head is Cadillac. I had requested a brochure for a CTS, and I got random unrelated spam just days later!

My LogMeIn unique address gets tons of spam - their response was that I must have given it away elsewhere. I no longer use LogMeIn.

Same here. I have (at the last count) over 200 website/service specific email aliases. I very rarely use an alias for more than one service. However when I do start getting spam on that alias, and I contact the website concerned they always state it's my fault. My response? If I can, I stop using that website or service.

My dropbox alias email started getting loads of spam about 2 years ago, I immediately junked that account, and set-up a new dropbox account (friends insist on sharing stuff over it...) - my old spammy dropbox alias is in the Dropbox leaked dump, my new current one isn't, which proves that this dump of credentials is from at least before 2015.

Is it necessarily service's fault? Could the e-mail address have been intercepted when some confirmation e-mail was being delivered? Not likely, I agree, but still...

I do the same, but some companies don't seem to be interested. I've had two different emails linked to a magazine's website and had spam to both.

When I've contacted them about it, they've been absolutely adamant that the spammer must have (twice) guessed the exact email address that I've had there.

You should report them to their country's data protection body. They are either maliciously selling your data against your explicit wishes or they've been hacked and are ignoring it.

I've had the same response. When I ask how come the spammer managed to successfully guess exactly the particular unique email address (including unique hashes appended to the service name as part of the username side of the address) on the first and only attempt (verified by looking at mail server logs), they just shrug.

I use spamgourmet.com for the unique-email-per-service..

Sadly, it doesn't support 2FA.

Would be cool to have a service do this automatically and test which services leak email addresses and which don't.

unique-per-service email addresses sound indeed interesting. How did you set it up?

I am a google apps customer and already have a few 20 aliases in there but having to go through their UI every time I sign up seems very tiresome. Can I create a wildcard email in the terms of service-*@bar.com being a alias of email foo@bar.com?

Do you know of a non-selfhosted provider that is able to do that?

/EDIT: Looks like fastmail, a service many on HN recommended is able to do something similar [0], though if one email gets added into a spam list, it seems to be not possible to remove one particular one.

/EDIT2: Fastmail just confirmed to be on Twitter that it is possible to set individual emails to rejected. Though this requires effectively creating a new alias and setting it to bounce which falls under the account limitations [1], so 600 for a single person account.

[0]: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html

[1]: https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html

In Gmail and Apps you can add a +suffix, e.g. dvcrn+hn1@gmail.com will send you mail, assuming your main address is dvcrn@gmail.com.

Gmail also ignores full stops, so you could also use d.v.crn@gmail or dvc.rn@gmail etc.

With Google Mail (and Apps) anything after a + in the first part of the address is ignored, so foo+dropbox@gmail.com would be routed to foo@gmail.com. That's the easiest way to do it that I know of. No need for managing separate aliases.

A lot of website purposely remove the part after the plus to avoid multiple sign ups with the same email, but different label.

Plus you can't completely shut down a label. You could route it into the trash but it will still end up in your email account.

Whilst great info, unfortunately most of the sites that one would actually try to use this on don't accept addresses containing a "+" as valid.

Another Google Mail trick is to use periods. Not as useful as the +, but for those sites that don't accept +, one can usually add in a few extra periods to place sites into buckets (multiple adjacent periods don't work).

m.y.e.m.a.i.l@example.com

Even if they did accept it, haven't spammers figured out the pattern by now?

I don't think spammers look at individual email addresses. They're interested in 50 million emails, not you. I suspect the number of people using subaddressing is too small to notice. If it became popular enough that even computer illiterate people began using it, that's when it would be noticed.

Unfortunately vendor sites such as apple.com don't realize xy@g and x.y@g are equivalent and will let people register both. If you accidentally click approve on the confirmation email then good luck getting Apple to remove the second account. Which is how my wife gets tons of email from Apple about a stranger's iTunes purchases along with other random items.

If you control the email address that the stranger registered to their Apple account, you could initiate a password reset, change the password, then login and change the email address to something that's not yours.

You probably just locked the stranger out of accessing their account though, so you probably shouldn't do this, unless said stranger is signing up for all kinds of services using your email address, in which case maybe they deserve it. :p

For gmail, if you have someone@gmail.com, you can just append +anything to your address like this: someone+anything@gmail.com. It will still end up in your mailbox without having to set up anything. See https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-mo...

I would assume that google apps version of gmail offers something similar.

Just tested this with my google apps account and it works there, too.

Also, iCloud allow this.

This feature is called sub-addressing, but it is also known as plus addressing or tagged addressing.

I also use it but some services do not allow the plus sign in their registration form. Very frustrating.

Rejecting addresses with a plus is to me a strong incompetence clue, so unless somehow unavoidable between two choices I chose the one allowing a '+'.

Sometime I even fire a mail explaining people rejecting '+' how and why they lost my business...

I feel the same way. (=

All google email addresses will accept

yourusername+anything@gmail.com

This also works on google apps hosted email domains. You can then use that as part of a filter if you start getting spam to it.

My email is handled by Google Apps for Business, and I just use e.g. dropbox@hemsley.cc or facebook@hemsley.cc - and have everything come to my real mailbox. Nothing to set up when I want to sign up for a new site. LastPass stores the different email addresses.

This works better than something+realaddress@gmail.com because many sites fail to handle/allow that 'format'.

I do this too. You get more spam with a catchall address, but Google get most of it. And there is no setup time lost with a new service - just use newservicename@yourdomain.com when signing up and you're away.

I used to use https://spamgourmet.com and was quite happy. You can create email addresses on the fly without doing anything in their UI: alias.number.account@spam gourmet.com. Alias is the per-site value, number is the count of emails you want to allow through before automatically routing the rest to /dev/null. I seem to recall an option to remove the numerical limit, too - once you trust the place you gave your address to.

Same here. It's free, it's incredibly easy to create new addresses, and so far (on the order of a decade) it's been trouble free for me. If you start getting spam any an address you just log in to spamgourmet, switch off the address and you're done. No send-this-plus-address filters to set up at your mail host, no subdomain tricks to fuss over, no need to create spam aliases on your Fastmail account. The only feature that I wish it had is the ability to view a log of where the spam was coming from for each address.

Yes but at the time, there was only evidence of password reuse leading to some comprised email lists... Not that password hashes themselves had been stolen. Sigh.

    > Unique-per-service email addresses work pretty well

and they're so easy with Gmail - anything following a '+' character after your username (or alias, if using your own/company domain) will go to the same box, but keep the distinct address.

Unfortunately, depressingly many sites validate email fields, and get it wrong - thinking '+' is not allowed.

IMO it's not even worth trying to get an email regex (or other validation) right - you're probably going to send out an activation email anyway!

I'm pretty sure they do know a `+` is allowed...

I've had sites reject an email containing +.

The trouble is that no one actually implements the email standard from the IETF RFC documents. In fact, some people[0] even actively discourage doing so, despite there being little in the way of good reason to not. The argument essentially goes "well, users aren't going to be likely to use those characters, unless they're doing something bad, and they make it difficult to insert the email into the database." I feel like that's a kind of laziness - we can fairly effectively remove that risk, and there are well tested tools to do so. But I do suspect that forbidding '+' is explicitly to avoid people using tagged emails. To be honest, the inconsistency in services allowing me to use '+' has caused me to just create a separate email for services that I don't have high trust for. Now no one gets my personal email, and I only check that one if I'm expecting something important.

[0] http://girders.org/blog/2013/01/31/dont-rfc-validate-email-a...

Email RFC is weird. Did you know email addresses are supposed to be case sensitive? Like bob@ and Bob@ are two different addresses? Some services treat them this way, most don't. That intersection (oauth2 for example from Google can return Bob.Smith@domain.com if Bob has a GA4W account, which causes trouble when the oauth handler inconsistently lower-casifies input.

Really? By my reading RFC-5321 & RFC-5322 leaves interpretation of the local-part up to the software running on the host where the mail is delivered, but since that interpretation is up to those servers, intermediate servers must treat them as case sensitive and not make modifications to the local-part.

That's my interpretation, as well. The standard is for carriers, not mailboxes. As a carrier, (or someone sending an email) you should respect case, as well as respect all of the special characters, because the server is allowed full decision power over whether those things are meaningfully used.

I mean, there are good reasons laid out in that document. "By RFC, email addresses are unique by mixed-case. Most (99.9+%) email systems do not treat email addresses as such."

Think of the average user. Sometimes they're going to capitalize the first letter when putting in their email, and sometimes they aren't. You don't want to make it unusually difficult for them to log in.

You -should- treat email the way that vast majority of hosted services do. "Foo Bar"@gmail.com is not allowed. Covering the million edge cases seems to not be worth the trouble, especially when it might cause difficulty for the average user

> Think of the average user. Sometimes they're going to capitalize the first letter when putting in their email, and sometimes they aren't. You don't want to make it unusually difficult for them to log in.

With smartphone keyboards and the capitalization of the first letter of the first word in form input fields by default, this is a very common occurrence. If case was considered for uniqueness of email addresses, at best, people would be extremely annoyed. At worst, there would be a tremendous amount of leakage of sensitive information to random people (due to human errors in entering case sensitive addresses), chaos due to incorrectly delivered emails and fatigue in receiving mails intended for thousands of other people. In an alternate universe where this is true, email would never have been a killer application, only a quickly killed and abandoned one. :)

So? What's your point?

I've encountered a number of sites that don't permit + in emails. I've also encountered a bunch that don't permit my hyphenated last name.

Other services also let you use the alias as a subdomain: example@alias.gmail.com. Wish Gmail added that feature. Do they have any place I can sent a feature request?

Another feature of Gmail is you can place dots anywhere in your email and it will still reach you: ex.am.ple@gmail.com. I haven't seen services that reject that so it is what I use when I can't use a +.

I host my email with FastMail who allow the use of subdomains. This is a great feature, and I use it frequently.

HOWEVER, you should only do so after careful consideration. This will restrict moving your email hosting to the limited number of providers who provide provide this type of service, or hosting your own server.

Alternatively, you could go and reset your email address with all of the services that you gave a subdomain email.

For myself, I have been using FastMail for years and feel confident that I will continue to use their services. In the event that I needed to move from FastMail, I know that could self host if forced to.

Except it's really obvious, and spammers can just remove the "+asd" section.

I do the unique address thing, but I also have another system for giving out temporary email addresses. If I want to hand an email address which I know should not receive email after say, this Saturday, I'll just give them "2016-09-03@tmp.grepular.com" - I don't have to do anything to set that up, it will accept mail as long as the date isn't after 3rd September 2016. I blogged it up a while ago here:

https://grepular.com/Automatically_Expiring_Email_Addresses

Interesting. I've been considering doing this but, frankly, have been too lazy to implement it. But if you are using a password manager anyway, what's one more field?

> On a side note, don't forget the time dropbox accepted ANY password during logins - http://www.cnet.com/news/dropbox-confirms-security-glitch-no...

I've not forgotten, and this glitch has kept me from ever considering opening a Dropbox account.

I'm surprised everyone else seems so forgiving of this massive screw up.

Haha for me it's the opposite. My password never works in Dropbox. I think it's because they don't support spaces in passwords, but they don't tell you when you change your password. They just accept the change and then you can't login.

There are many sites with little exceptions like that. I think that their password filter allows the characters, but their backend input sanitization doesn't, so it cleans it up and inserts a transformed version of the pass without providing notification. I've found this happens particularly often with passwords with symbols like !, #, or ;.

In general, this is one of the most frustrating things with trying to secure yourself online. I have gone through like "I WANT TO USE PASSPHRASES" then gone to places like PAYPAL and had them have an upper limit on password length. It's absurd that they all have slightly different requirements. I am switching to a password manager now.

This problem has been noted for some time. Past articles on the subject have shown how the various requirements for passwords come about through a combination of limitations imposed by the system they're being used on, or through misguided attempts at making things easier for users.

I wonder if there has ever been an attempt through a forum like RFCs or ISO to define a worldwide (or at least latin char set) standard for password requirements. Based on what i've seen in forums like this, there seems to be fairly broad acceptance that allowing a large number of characters from a character set with as few limitations as possible bests serves the interest of security. The thorniest issue would likely be about balancing requirements for increased complexity (eg capitals and lowercase, numbers, etc) with ease of use.

I'm using password with spaces for Dropbox without any problems. Must be something else is an issue at your side... Have you tried resetting it ?

Totally. You wanna talk about people forgetting? It seems everyone has totally forgotten (or forgiven) that Dropbox was mentioned specifically in the Snowden leaks as a source.

are there better alternatives though?

box.com is pretty good. I've personally used it for several years now and I can't recall the last time there was any real issue with it, usability or security-wise.

"Better" is subjective. I consider Google Drive much better, personally.

Alternatives, though? Plenty: Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, iCloud Backup and iCloud Drive.. the list goes on with a simple Google search for "online storage"

Does google drive work the same way as Dropbox? Cross platform, acts as a folder in your home dir, selective sync, etc? Seriously ready to move on from Dropbox and my google fiber account comes with a free terabyte of google drive.

I've never set it up but I believe that you can get it to work the same way.

Install the desktop application: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2374987 Change sync settings: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375083

IIRC it has limited linux support, but works that way in windows/macOS. Another article today mentioned rclone, if you need linux support.

There's no Drive for Linux, alas.

The Windows and Mac clients create a folder in your home directory. There are ways to rename it, but essentially anything you put in the ~/Google Drive/ folder is synced just like Dropbox.

No native linux support is a bummer, but if you only need to use it there infrequently, the web client is quite capable for manual uploads and downloads.

Don't forget Spideroak! They offer end-to-end encryption of your data.

if you are willing to use a rather more complicated system with harder setup, syncthing.net is great, it syncs files between your computers without needing a cloud service.

For more similar alternatives, running owncloud on a VM is straightforward. And, of course the featureset is limited compared to Dropbox.

I had big problems with OwnCloud. Specifically it ate files at work, but did so in such an insidious manner (slowly, over time, with no indication that anything was wrong) that I don't trust it to this day. I haven't checked lately, but the issue was acknowledged by OwnCloud devs, with the workaround being to "use a secondary sync application" (no kidding). These days I use Seafile, and I can also say that your suggestion of Syncthing is a good one. I have used and enjoy both Syncthing and Seafile. Just a word of advice: Don't trust Seafile to encrypt your data. Use Veracrypt (or equivalent) in place of the built-in "encryption" offered by Seafile.

50% of the leaked hashes were bcrypt and the other 50% were salted sha1.

So, asking the HNers who crack passwords or follow the tech closely and have a good feel:

Salted sha1 can be brute forced much quicker, but in practical terms what kind of complexity of password is vulnerable today if it was stored salted sha1 vs bcrypt?

And how can this be projected to change in the next couple of years?

Mostly what Troy says is that the sha1 were salted with a salt not available in the files he was provided. That doesn't mean the salt wasn't leaked. But if it wasn't, and the salt was a 128bit, unique to each password, cryptographic random salt, I'd say they are not really vulnerable. So it depends on the strength, randomness and availability of the salt.

How come the salts aren't available? Did the attacker choose not to release them, or were they stored elsewhere?

Or were they really bad salts? Like a hash of the username?

That wouldn't really be a proper salt, although technically it would fulfil the purpose of a salt, which is to prevent lookup tables being used.

Oh I agree, but I've seen too many "clever" systems which derive the salt from something like the username or another field or fields in the DB.

Just because there is no obvious salt now doesn't mean it's not there. Only Dropbox knows how it worked at this point.

We will have to wait for a code leak ;-)

Uh oh. You might be on to something. Salts are pretty much always stored right next to the hash, right? If the hack doesn't contain them, maybe they were doing something "clever" like that.

The salts for the sha1 passwords weren't leaked. So they're hard to crack in practical terms. Depends how random they were.

See hashcat docs and benchmarks for complete answers to your questions. The GPU versions of hashcat.

I actually googled before asking my question, and couldn't come up with a good feel for just how crackable these are with hashcat... I guess I don't know the terms or the prices.

Is anyone able to make any sense of the GPU hashcat benchmarks that are posted? Something distilled down to "if you spend $xxx, then you can crack any salted sha1 under 12 letters+digits+punctuation in n hours if you knew the salt; if its bcrypt, that would take x hours". Something like that ;)

Added: I'm a bit confused how the attackers know the hash and not the salt though; normally they are stored side-by-side. Or were dropbox using a site-wide salt?

(I've seen systems with a site-wide salt hardcoded into the codebase and a per-user salt in the db with the hash; This means attackers have to compromise both sourcecode and db to get far.)

Hash can be stored somewhere else. I also saw systems where some kind of constant for the user was used as a salt. For example first 5 characters of username or timestamp of registration.

A rough estimate for using spot instances on EC2 says you can get maybe 40 trillion SHA1 hashes per dollar. (700MH/s and just under $.07/hour) So one dollar will crack a password 7 characters long. A million dollars will crack a password 10 characters long.

Switch to bcrypt and you're now at 25 million hashes per dollar on those same instances. Now you can barely crack passwords that are 4 characters long, or for a million dollars you get 7 characters.

That's if you know the salt, of course. Otherwise that gets added on to the length you're cracking.

None of this is very exact but it gets you in the right ballpark. And you can compare it to a password manager spitting out 20 character passwords that are completely immune to brute forcing.

This is why strong passwords are important. You can crack a lot of users with Password2016! At 25M/$.

Pro tip: Build your own GPU cluster out of consumer gear. It's orders of magnitude cheaper because GPUs for the data center are expensive and/or slow. Our commercial cracker is consumer gear in a custom built chassis in colocation. Cloud GPU just isn't there yet.

So, please give some rough stats :)

I mean... people have also been using FPGAs for password cracking for years too.

I think it's quite unlikely whoever took control of this managed to dump an entire database but couldn't access a password salt.

Do we know for sure these were "salted SHA"? It could well be "SHA1-HMAC through an HSM", and thus, actually be the stronger option.

Alternatively, someone has probably kept a lot of cracked passwords to themselves.

It depends how many rounds of sha1 were used and what was the load setting on bcrypt. You can make either one harder to break by playing with those parameters.

SHA1 is not necessarily weaker. They might have used many rounds of hashing, which could have made them even stronger.

Repeating from the other thread:

I highly recommend Troy's HIBP service, hiding your e-mail from showing up in public searches (important for opsec), and donating whatever you can to Troy. He's doing excellent work. This is the first time it's notified me and it was great, because I completely forgot I signed up. I appreciate a service that low maintenance.

HIBP is a truly essential service and I'd be happy to pay more. Even with good password discipline it's useful knowledge on your exposure and I cannot recommend it enough. He mentions it near the end but this is one of those no brainers that should be repeated very loudly.

https://haveibeenpwned.com

Thanks for linking to this site, it says my address was breached in Dropbox, LinkedIn, Gawker media(?) and Tumblr

I changed my Dropbox password last week after they sent the email, same with LinkedIn.

Great site though

It really is about time we stopped using passwords.

Honestly curious, what should we use?

Public-key crypto. Client side X.509 certificates for the web. S/MIME and OpenPGP keys for email. OpenSSH keys for SSH. etc

We tried using X.509 certificates in Denmark for proving your identity to the state.

It was a complete nightmare unless you understood what public key crypto is, how it works, and how to configure your browser for it.

Don't get me started about having to move your certificate/keys around.

It doesn't work for the masses.

There's a world of difference between a well-designed pubkey interface like ssh-agent and what you get in today's browsers.

I don't know how feasible it would be to replace passwords for the general public, but if browser vendors were actually serious about security, they could go a very long way towards making client certs feasible just by giving up on their current strategy of putting their fingers in their ears and pretending it doesn't exist.

Something similar in Spain, your mandatory ID card is a smart card, and you can also ask for free personal certificates from the Royal Mint. Works really great to do paperwork from home, but only a minority uses it.

So when are the browser vendors going to fix their interfaces?

I'd love it if every time I wanted to log in, I entered my username/email, saw a two factor-auth, and had an email sent with a time sensitive link containing my session credentials. But this would be a pain in the ass if I had a slow connection or used an old email address. And worse, it be totally unsafe if I could (easily?) change the email address attached to the account.

magic link. That's what medium does for email logins, and slack offers the option as well. it's easily one of the safest methods

Though slack magic links always stay valid... Leaving a nice plain text password for all MTAs that forward my mail.

Ah.. Yes, but that will leave anyone that has somehow gotten access to my mail to suddenly have access to all my accounts then, wouldn't it?

They already do if they have password reset over email. That's why you need 2FA.

Agreed. I've just donated, and the link for that is https://haveibeenpwned.com/Donate

Since lots of people will be rotating passwords, this is probably a good time to set up Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) as well.

I recommend Authy as your 2FA app, as it lets you set a backup password, which you can use to move your 2FA tokens between devices.

For your critical services, keeping encrypted copies of your backup codes is a must.

Note the hack was in 2012. Hopefully most people have rotated passwords by now.

Anyone know of automated ways to rotate all the passwords on all of our accounts across the web?

It's a common feature of password managers.

Honest question: Why does any none need password managers? Does not chrome password sync or firefox sync do the job? Thanks

To generate random, strong passwords. Also not to be locked into a browser. Better actual password management (e.g. last changed). Tags.

A canary of chrome did have the ability to generate random passwords, but password management in chrome is still a pain IMO. Not sure about FF, but a quick google suggests it doesn't generate random passwords automatically.

FF doesn't, but as usual, there are addons for that :)

Chrome and Firefox are password managers :)

People use other managers for many reasons: storing passwords (and other secrets) which aren't used on a site, using them on different browsers (say, Safari on the desktop and Chrome on mobile) and lack of trust on the browser's password manager.

Also, for a long time, browsers didn't save passwords with forms marked with autocomplete=off.

Some of us still use native applications that don't use Chrome or Firefox.

Can any open source password managers do this?

When I used pwsafe and keepassx they had this option.

Wow, single point of failure for all my accounts, all my credential, all my personal, private and public data. I would love to use it!

I know you're being sarcastic, but with lastpass you can rotate most of your passwords.

https://blog.lastpass.com/2014/12/introducing-auto-password-...

Anyone know of an open source Firefox extension that can do this?

I don't, but would the extension in-effect need to have all your passwords too? Since I don't know of any battle tested (multiple very bad vulnerabilities exposed in public) password managers that offer this other than LastPass, I say check out the public opinion of that extension.

Yes, but as an extension it could just call into Firefox (which has all the passwords) to do all the work.

Have you tried this? It fails for most sites IME.

Yes I did (I didn't want to say it, disappointing most HNers).

I works for most of the major websites (Google, Amazon, etc. I think you can look them up). And also handles multiple google accounts pretty well, even when an google account is logged in, without logging it out. And it definitely doesn't works for the majority of the websites.

(And now for the skeptical ones) I'd say use it for websites you use 2FA since any bug (or intentional backdoor) won't be successful.

PSA: If you're using LastPass for managing passwords, DONOT use their 2FA authenticator app, since now it offers an option to autofill option. Now that is the point where you're crossing into al eggs in one basket territory.

Normal people don't rotate passwords unless they are forced to.

I still feel squeamish about Authy having all the tokens - what happens when they get breached?

2FA is an extra layer of protection, not a panacea.

A successful attack would require both an Authy breach and that the attacker have passwords for the services that they want to compromise.

This should buy you enough time to regenerate your 2FA tokens to mitigate the threat.

this is probably a good time to set up Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) as well.

Note: Dropbox also supports U2F for 2FA, which provides much better protection agains phishing.

https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2015/08/u2f-security-keys/

If you use a YubiKey then you can move tokens between devices without needing to trust a third party, nor worry about them somehow being exfiltrated from your phone.

https://www.yubico.com/

Has anyone had yubikey fail?

I have one on my keychain, never an issue in years, but I can't help but be concerned, one day, I will be locked out...

I've dropped my YubiKey quite far onto hard ground, dropped it in water, and various other abuses. It seems quite hardwearing.

I just have two, if you're doing strictly u2f they are less than $20. I have a nano4 and a neo that I use for u2f, oath tokens, and rsa keys for sign/encrypt/auth. It's not the cheapest setup but it's highly functional and about the best account security I could put together. I lost a gmail account for 45 minutes once and decided that would be much worse then the cost of the keys.

When I ran a CA, half of my root key to unlock the more sensitive keys was stored on an older Yubikey on a necklace and it never left my neck. That includes the shower and rolling over on it in bed. I couldn't make that thing fail, and arguably I wanted to based on how I treated it. (Back it up, though.)

2FA is a major inconvenience. The login process goes from 1-2 sec to 30sec. Sometimes a lot longer (some 2FA do not seem to think it is critical to send the email or txt msg right away, and even when they do, email servers do not really work real time, and then you have the time it takes to find your phone, unlock, decline twice the iOS update prompt, go to the right app, find the right msg, copy the code, check it is correct, etc etc).

Yeah if it is really a critical service and rarely used, we should. But if I have to wait 30sec in front of a login box every time I go on netfix or on amazon, you can bet their sales will go down the drain.

I have my 2FA in Notification Center and consider this fine given that it's second factor. With that, it's about eight seconds for me involving one slide of my finger. I'm also mystified that you think support for 2FA and mandatory 2FA are the same thing, particularly for something like Netflix.

I am not arguing about support vs mandatory. Just that I am not convinced 2FA is a compeling alternative. At least the way I see it implemented.

I like the idea behind SQRL, which still requires another device, so still inconvenient, but at least it does not rely on the server sending a message through a slow protocol. The website displays a QR code, you launch an app, scan the QR code, this app connects to the server and authenticate you through cryptography. No login or password to type, no message to wait for or to copy manually. No privacy concern since it does not rely on a third party. I could live with that.

If you're discussing sales, you are arguing mandatory.

Duo is the counterpoint to 2FA being cumbersome.

2FA doesn't have to be done over email/SMS. Nearly all websites these days support Google Authenticator protocol enabling use of a wide race of app/devices (for example my Garmin watch) to produce the code. No need to wait for an email/SMS.

Most services have the option of remembering your 2FA authentication on a certain device. For example, I have to enter my LastPass password in my computer to login, but I only have to use 2FA if I'm logging in from a new device.

> some 2FA do not seem to think it is critical to send the email or txt msg right away, and even when they do, email servers do not really work real time

SMS isn't real time either, it's best effort. Mostly (~99,9%) it gets through within seconds, but delays of a few minutes are perfectly acceptable to telcos. As service provider you can't do much about it, either pay through the nose for "priority" delivery (which maybe halves the amount of delayed messages in our experience) or tell your customers to switch mobile providers (yeah, good luck with that).

As a service provider there is something you can do about it: Use well known out-of-band 2FA specs such as TOTP. Those are compatible with Google Authenticator and don't require a phone number, which is a massive inconvenience (not always available, not available in every country, SMS not reliable, requires an ID, not free, leaks personal information to the service provider, ...)

Well, yeah. We're not using SMS for 2FA, just for delivering monitoring alerts. With those reliability statistics (and the impossibility to improve it) I wouldn't do SMS-based 2FA at all.

We've found other interesting behavior in email-to-SMS services using it for alerts (this is in the US):

Verizon: will deliver all messages typically with low latency.

AT&T: Variable delivery latency and they have some sort of rate-limiting where if your system generates 10 alert messages within a short period, they queue them up for a couple of hours!

Inmarsat: Fast consistent delivery but they have an undocumented rate cap that when reached results in all (all!) messages being black-holed for 30 days. There is no way to reset this state. The cap is something 150 messages per month or 5 per 10 minute period.

> 2FA is a major inconvenience. The login process goes from 1-2 sec to 30sec.

That's definitely true, and it's definitely annoying. But one is not logging in every day (or even, I hope, every month: 90-day cookies are safe enough).

You auth machines you use regularly so that login is 30 seconds once.

That's not such a high penalty so that devices you've physically used are authorized and all others aren't.

I browse with tin foil hat settings so I authenticate multiple times a day.

Then you wouldn't complain about an extra few seconds for 2FA.

I do.

I don't turn on 2FA because it's a pain in the ass. I want to like it but the extra annoyance isn't compelling enough for me.

In that case, you might be better off investing in an OTP device? [1]

It's hard to make a strong recommendation without knowing where on the scale of 1 to RMS you are...

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531926/a-physical-key-to-...

This does sound perfect to me. However I worry about losing a token without a established way to replace it.

For me I don't like staying logged into most services, I find it very uncomfortable that my computer "remembers" me for some reason. I use a browser plugin to delete cookies on tab close and don't save any history. I'm not so much RMS, just like my browser to "start fresh" most of the time. I also use a VPN 90% of the time.

So I value quick login more than account security, I guess.

I have to disagree with the Authy recommendation. I switched to Authy a few years ago, but it was nothing but painful and I have recently migrated away from it. For a long time the "TouchID Prompt" was slow and buggy, but that does appear to be fixed now.

The real pain point is that it managed to corrupt one of my keys (how??) and the app tries to get me to backup my keys to their servers with multiple popups (which I cannot disable) prompting me to backup every time I use the app. I don't know why they are so determined to get hold of my OTP keys, but it isn't happening.

I'm currently using an app called "OTP Auth" and it seems quite nice, and is quick to use.

a major advantage is if I throw my phone into the ocean(not a theoretical attack!) I can still recover my OTP on another machine. Authy offers this pretty nicely

I would recommend testing theories of :

- losing phone

- losing computer

- losing both

and have reasonable backup strategies for these scenarios.

I use Google's authenticator on my phone and a 50-line python script on my desktop PC. I store the OTPs in a JSON file and the python script runs them through the TOTP algorithm and spits out my 6-digit code on the console.

I'm less worried about losing my "computer" since I don't own a laptop, plus the secrets are backed up using my normal backup process.

A good 2FA system involves backup keys which can be stored in a safe or safety deposit box, not handing your private key over to a third party.

Isn't that the point of having backup codes for Google, etc.? I can use those to restore my account, and secure them however I like.

Backing up the secrets to a third party makes them vulnerable to anyone who can hack your Authy account. I'm not sure what that requires, possibly hacking a phone number. Of course, there's also a backup password, but then you're just replacing the "physical" factor in 2FA with another password.

Without Authy, to compromise my account, you need physical access to my phone, my backup codes, or another backup mechanism I've specified. Authy just provides an additional way to compromise my account, and I don't think it provides any real benefit in exchange for that risk.

You should have the backup codes stored somewhere more secure than your computer either way, quite possibly printed out.

> the app tries to get me to backup my keys to their servers

That's the idea for using Authy.

1Password can do 2FA, also syncs between all your devices. And no trusted 3rd party cloud service.

Keeping all the keys (password and 2FA tokens) in 1Password means it isn't true 2FA anymore:

https://blog.agilebits.com/2011/09/23/two-factor-or-not-two-...

They're actually talking about 2FA for 1password itself. Not supporting TOTP via 1password for other services.

And what happens if 2FA seeds are stolen from the site?

I also recommend authy. Makes 2fa slightly less painful.

Not a fault of authy, but namecheap and paypal both don't offer support.

I'm especially angry at namecheap because their homegrown 2fa solution is unreliable. Especially when travelling. I'm considering leaving them agter 4 years of promises to support authy but nothing!

Ugh, tell me about it. I check this page every now and then and just notice new comments and a response from Evgenia S. that the team is working on it:

https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...

FWIW, Gandi.net supports TOTP, but their prices are a bit higher. However if you only own a handful of domains, the $20/year difference won't really matter.

> 1Password now has a subscription service for $3 a month and you get the first 6 months for free.

Don't pay for this people. Use the open source password manager Keepass http://keepass.info/

the website is so poorly designed, it leads to consumer-non-adoptability.

Indeed. I would really love to recommend Keepass, but their website is really ugly and makes the impression of a non-polished software - even though Keepass is absolute mature and fine.

On the other hand, the PuTTY website is also everything but polished, but people have always been using it. Also, I suspect that most people will get it through the third-party site "www.putty.org" instead of the real PuTTY website, whose URL is as complicated as: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.h...

> their website is really ugly

I don't think it's ugly -- just dated. Isn't it weird that mentally we trust software less if they have a dated website? Shouldn't it be the opposite? (As in: a dated website means this software is mature and tested?)

The problem with dated websites is that they have the appearance of being thrown on the web in 10 minutes and forgotten about rather than being mature and tested.

If the software is well supported and maintained than the website should be too.

Isn't the mentality more to do with insecure sites having dated websites with misleading links etc. Unless its a known company a dated/poor website often flags warnings for me about security, support for the product and more.

It could also mean the software is abandoned and hasn't received security updates in a long time.

Heh, it doesn't even look half bad if you drop the bettermotherfuckingwebsite css on it.

You know what always gets me: PuTTY's website isn't served over HTTPS. That software everyone downloads to type all their firewall and router credentials into... is from a website not served over HTTPS. I see the download and signature links are, but if I could have this non-HTTPS website offer up different links to your web browser...

The downloads are all GPG-signed, so that shouldn't be an issue. You have the issue of the initial trust, but that applies to HTTPS too to a lesser extent.

How many people do you think download the application, then check the signature? Additionally, if you can spoof the download link on this HTTP page, you can also spoof the signature link, and provide a fake signature matching your malicious package.

Frankly, about the same number of people as the number checking the HTTPS certificates are as expected. GPG does have the advantage though that once the public key is known and trusted, the package can't be tampered with on the server. (Authenticode might also work, but then you're back to trusting all the CAs that Windows does.)

I love and use 1password, but to be honest I can't see any 'pro' features that I need/want:

https://support.1password.com/pro-features/

1Password is well worth the money. It is well designed for both desktop and mobile and I am happy to pay for software that I use every day.

It absolutely blows my mind that people are okay with giving their passwords (encrypted or not, see this very breach for why that's not always enough) to a 3rd party, but are not okay reusing a password somewhere.

If 1Password ever got owned, the Internet would be severely fucked.

And to stem the potential flood a bit, I realize there are plenty of good counterargument built up over the years to try and combat this general idea, but fundamentally the concept of giving your password to someone else to manage is still a confounding idea, regardless of whatever points those arguments make.

> It absolutely blows my mind that people are okay with giving their passwords (encrypted or not, see this very breach for why that's not always enough) to a 3rd party

That sounds more like LastPass than 1Password, although I haven't looked at the new subscription offering.

I don't give my passwords to 1Password.

You don't give your passwords to LastPass either, you give them encrypted random noise they can't do anything with.

Which does not change the parent post's point, that with LastPass you're still giving it to a 3rd party who could leak that information for brute forcing.

If someone could brute force my LastPass password I'd be impressed.

And who, exactly, encrypts them for you?

Dropbox was also encrypting your passwords, FWIW.

IIRC encryption and decryption is done on the client side and the server only stores encrypted data.

Dropbox was not encrypting passwords they were hashing them.

If you stored already encrypted files on Dropbox nobody can decrypt those files provided your encryption key is good.

> Dropbox was not encrypting passwords they were hashing them.

Incorrect.

That's a really unhelpful comment. Please specify what encryption you think Dropbox is doing on the passwords and what knowledge you have on the topic.

I'm pretty sure you're going to say "they do TLS" and then the person you're talking to can go ahead and explain that the encryption LastPass/1Password does protects an entirely different threat model, but unless you have a conversation here no one is going to be able to communicate a thing.

To be clear, I don't owe you or anyone anything with regards to this conversation. I am not obligated to conform to any particular conversational strategy, and if my intention was to simply claim something was incorrect without elaborating, I am entitled to do so.

That said, I was wrong. I recalled what bcrypt does incorrectly.

Good luck with that.

How exactly is that incorrect? The article is stating that the passwords are bcrypt and SHA1 hashes.

My passwords are synced through WiFi on my local network, but thanks for your concern.

Using a strong key and cipher, you should feel safe giving anyone your information.

Keys can still be cracked, and ciphers can be broken. Not giving anyone your information, if you don't have to, is always the preferred option.

No it's not, like with anything it's a trade off.

If the construction 1Password standalone uses to encrypt passwords is broken, we have bigger concerns than our passwords.

A great example was the recent Opera browser sync hack. Everyone who uses it has to change ALL of their passwords everywhere. Password managers are a TERRIBLE idea, and it's kinda sad so many security researchers recommend them. Single point of failure is a really basic concept to understand.

Password reuse has been slightly overblown as a concern. Things like your Google, GitHub, TeamViewer, bank, etc. accounts should always be unique. But if someone hacks your password for the Engadget forums or something, does it matter that they can now log in to your Kotaku commenting account? REALLY? People talk about how they have hundreds of accounts and could never remember passwords for all of them, so need a password manager... but in reality, only a few of those accounts actually matter.

And you're better off leaving a piece of paper with passwords on it by your desk than using a password manager. The likelihood of a digital hack of a password manager is infinitely greater than the likelihood of someone breaking into your house to get your passwords (instead of like... just taking your TV).

The majority of cloud-based password managers perform encryption client-side. A server hack would leave the attacker with random garbage. Short of brute-forcing your master password, they're not likely to get anything.

The only real concerns here are weak crypto and backdoors. If your threat model includes backdoors planted by software vendors you trust, not using a password manager won't help you, since someone might as well just backdoor your browser and get your brain-managed passwords as you type them. I'd stay away from webapp-based password managers, as planting a backdoor is typically easier for these.

Weak crypto is a hard problem, so you'd have to do some research and check whether the format your password manager uses has been vetted by the crypto community.

Looking at the vectors that are most commonly used to hack people today, I'm certain that password managers would be a massive improvement compared to the short and re-used passwords the majority of users use today.

1Password only recently added a service which syncs your vault with them. I use 1Password with a vault that exists only on my encrypted MBP. If my laptop is decrypted and my 1P vault is decrypted then yes I'm screwed. What's the alternative exactly?

That isn't how 1Password works. Passwords are encrypted clientside, in a standalone native application.

Who wrote the standalone native application?

To be more direct, I'm suggesting the standalone native application may not completely correctly implement the encryption algorithms. I have no evidence of this, but the concept still concerns me.

That's not what you said. You said that if someone owned up 1Password, the whole Internet would be in trouble. But that's like saying that if someone owned up one of the OpenSSH developers, the Internet would be instantly vulnerable. A false statement.

It's a true statement, not a false one. If someone was able to release an intentionally vulnerable version of OpenSSH/1Password, people who updated would be "instantly* (your word) vulnerable.

> As for Dropbox, they seem to have handled this really well.

I'm biased, but I can't agree with this. From what I can tell, there are two communications from Dropbox -- one in 2012 [1] and one last week [2].

In 2012 they did not disclose that hashes were stolen, so I don't see how it's really relevant. In the latest communication, they don't actually explain the risk to the user. They say it is "purely as a preventative measure" but if salts and hashes were accessed, then that is not the case.

Just because Troy doesn't have access to some of the salts, doesn't mean the attacker doesn't have access. We don't know how many iterations of SHA-1, but SHA-1 can be run by a single GPU on the order of billions of times per second. So unless Dropbox is coming out and saying they know for certain that random 128-bit salts were definitely not accessed by the attacker, almost all of the SHA1 hashed passwords are getting cracked. Users need to know their passwords are exposed, and must be reset not as a preventative measure, but because they are almost certain to be compromised.

As for the salted/bcrypt passwords, we can see from Troy's hash they used $2a$08$ which is bcrypt with a cost factor of 8 -- 2^8 iterations. Gosney's latest rig [3] could crack these bcrypt hashes at about 105,700 / 8 = 13,212 per second. That's not terrible, but that's still 416 billion tries in a year for a modest investment.

[1] - https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2012/07/security-update-ne... [2] - https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2016/08/resetting-password... [3] - https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a27...

> > As for Dropbox, they seem to have handled this really well.

> I'm biased, but I can't agree with this. From what I can tell, there are two communications from Dropbox -- one in 2012 [1] and one last week [2].

Especially given that 2012 they assured me that no credentials were lost and this time they didn't even inform me since my account was deleted in the mean time. So it's more or less luck that I know that my old password was compromised.

See my comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/50ggbn/the_dropbox_...

>> "Users need to know their passwords are exposed, and must be reset not as a preventative measure, but because they are almost certain to be compromised."

This should be assumed regardless of what is known if it's know a breach happened; meaning basic password hygiene should be followed, and I'm the case of Dropbox, if a user had any plaintext files with passwords to other accounts (yes, people still do this) - they need to change those passwords too.

Right, but you're assuming optimal response from every Dropbox user, when I'd assume the vast majority of Dropbox users aren't aware of best password practices (or are aware and only change passwords when forced anyway because 'I have nothing to hide'). The severity of the breach means Dropbox should be forcing password changes. I didn't even receive an e-mail notifying of the breach. Nothing in the spam filters, it's just not there. The only reason I'm aware of it is Troy Hunt, and the only reason I'd ever be aware of it is that. I was getting ready to leave dropbox anyway, this just reasserted that it's the correct decision.

Honestly, I've found security bugs in Dropbox using it (oddly) as designed in the past and would never use it again; basically, as a non admin I could become an admin in a business account; reported the issue, had a call with them and it appeared they fixed it, but still it was a wtf moment for me given if you're an admin you are able to permanently delete all the data and according to Dropbox the data would not be recoverable regardless of the time frame.

As for the average user, to be honest at the point I increaslying feel like people are responsible for their own security and if you that concerned a service won't notify you of a breach or make a mistake that to you is unforgivable — don't use them. Reason I take this position now is because increased you feel like all the hand holding related to security is dangerous long-term.

I agree that, ultimately, the only person who really cares about your security is you. That is certainly where the buck stops, and if a service has security you don't agree with stop doing business with them.

However, a forced password and session reset on accounts whose credentials have become public knowledge isn't "hand holding." It's SysAdmin101. It should be the first thing you do. Unless I'm misreading you, the stated stance is "Anyone using dropbox got what they deserved," but not everyone has the knowledge to perform a security audit. The user is not without blame or having made mistakes, but Dropbox isn't taking ownership of their own mistakes or being transparent to every affected user about what those mistakes were and/or led to. If they want to be a service that does hand-holding, they can give the correct advice. If they don't, they NEED to be transparent about what occurred and what information was released or the onus is entirely on them. Right now, they're doing neither. I think that is criminally negligent, though I'm certain no legal action will be taken.

I feel that lowering those expectations of a service only helps justify these shitty, lazy practices to others.

The only thing that would've been exposed in the breach relating to me are the e-mail address and password for that service itself (alongside all the crappy memes I stored there), but I'm not ready to watch the world burn from the sidelines. The security of others is just as much your personal security, and the more of it others sacrifice the more you'll be expected to do the same and suffer repercussions for not doing so.

I don't remember the details, but I remember that it was really awful how they handled it back in 2012. Really thought about dropping them (small pun intended). I am very happy to see that they got better, but am still a little sceptical.

The email they sent out completely neglects to mention that there was a breach unless you follow a link:

"We’re reaching out to let you know that if you haven’t updated your Dropbox password since mid-2012, you’ll be prompted to update it the next time you sign in. This is purely a preventative measure, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience.

To learn more about why we’re taking this precaution, please visit this page on our Help Center. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at password-reset-help@dropbox.com"

Horrible communication, much more important than to force a change on the site itself is to say to all users: look, your passwords are at risk, if you reused them change them now. All that in a way that non-techies can understand. Else we can all just wait for the millions of compromised accounts.

Dropbox is about the only service I use a memorable password for, as it has my 1Password file in it, which has my Google one-time-auth codes in it. If I lose my phone while on the road, only remembering my Dropbox password is going to get me out of the mess. Any sensible other solutions here? It's still ~14 characters, but other than making it more random, what are my options?

Xkcd's correct-horse-battery-staple technique?

Check out diceware. Easy technique to memorise a lot of entropy

Keep your password written on a piece of paper in your wallet, with a few extra characters you need to remember to ignore.

or a few extra characters you need to add. As much as people say this is a bad idea, most of the people you would be trying to keep out, don't have access to your wallet.

I did this for a few months for a master password and set everything to forget the password so I used it several times a day. After a little while I can get rid of the paper and have a LONG random password that is committed to memory.

And the average mugger most likely wouldn't know what to do with a long random string (or multiple). The bank notes next to them are much more interesting.

Here's the advanced version, that let you use different, mostly uncorrelated passwords for different services. http://blog.jgc.org/2010/12/write-your-passwords-down.html

I have implemented a little program to generate such a square: http://loup-vaillant.fr/projects/password-generator

Though by now, I find this a little tedious. I'm thinking of using an encrypted password database, protected with a diceware generated password. That way I will be able to copy&paste my passwords instead of typing them by hand.

Use 2 factor authentication and rotate both passwords. I have the opposite setup - Dropbox password is random and the password manager (stored inside) is memorized. It would be harsh to lose access, but not unrecoverable.

Switch to SpiderOak: https://spideroak.com/

All of my passwords are based on the website name that I'm logging in to. I have a small algorithm in my head about how to generate a password from the site name that looks at stuff like first and last letter, number of letters, some kind of prefix/suffix, etc. And I end up with a unique password around 20 characters that I don't need to remember for every website.

This way I don't ever remember a password, I just remember the system.

Although that feels secure, it's a poor way, security by obscurity is weak. As soon as some one realize, all your passwords will be revealed...

What can be better alternative? IMO using something like 1Password/Lastpass is less secure because it then only takes someone to get my master password to get all my other passwords.

Your master password shouldn't really be something that's going to be in either a dictionary, or brute forcible. Nobody is going to "get" it unless you make it insecure. If you're using their sync services, however (especially LastPass), you're more vulnerable to phishing attacks, and the vault can potentially be stolen and crack attempts run offline. However, both services use a heavy level of encryption that requires the passphrase to unlock, so as long as that's not dictionary based or brute forcible, you're totally fine.

They would also need access to the machine which you have your vault stored on which would be your laptop and your phone and nothing else.

In order to determine the algo have_faith is using, an attacker would probably need a sample size of at least 4 passwords from different sites (at least, my algo definitely would).

If an attacker has access to 4 of your passwords in plaintext, you have bigger fish to fry.

This is true. I don't think the system is obvious unless you had multiple passwords, on top of that it's not immediately obvious that there is a system in the first place from looking at the plaintext password.

When one of the sites you use gets breached, you'll want/need to change your password and won't be able to use the same single algorithm. This will throw things of as you won't be able to use a single algorithm. Sure you could not use two. But you'll need to remember what sites use which one.

It's a pretty shitty algo if someone can reverse engineer it with a sample of 1...

not to mention forced password recycling.

How do you deal with websites that won't let you use >8char or certain characters?

I use this same method, but my method will often generate special characters, and AWS as an example, and several others (apparently following AWS' lead) won't let you use those. (Any punctuation not on the shift-numbers row of USA keyboards are not considered legit for password use)

I still mostly use this system, and given my lucky memory I can memorise the exceptions, but I doubt a vast majority of the population could follow my example.

I basically just have a system for altering the generated passwords based on the specific site requirements. For instance if it requires a max num of chars then I will just chop off the password at that amount. And similar systems for other requirements.

As long as your Dropbox password is unique, you're all set.

You can keep 1pass on an iOS device, and auth using fingerprint. Ultimately you're still going to need/want to know the actual underlying passwords to both iOS and 1pass, however.

Are 1Password's files not encrypted? Store it publicly on your web site, email it to your friends, print it out in base64 in a machine-readable font and keep copies pinned on the wall of your cube. You still have to remember one password but at least you're depending on crypto instead of Dropbox's security.

Exactly this. Or just store a copy on another device of yours, on a USB flash drive, etc.

Can someone in the know indicate how to BEST manage passwords for different services in a secure way in 2016? Should I be using password managers (à la 1Password, LastPassword and others), or use something like Keychain Access on Mac OS X (what are the Windows equivalents?), anything else? It's important to note that not everyone is well-educated on the matter, despite the fact that most people on HN are technical people.

EDIT: Thanks everyone for your answers, this is a good example of the power of communities.

Unique passwords for each site (I use a password manager) and add two factor auth whenever possible.

Password manager + two factor authentication whenever possible. As for the former: Opinions here differ but my recommendation would be not to trust a "cloud" password manager and employ an offline password manager instead. KeePass works great for instance and is open source and cross-platform.

While an offline password manager is inherently more secure, at some point you're either going to have to store the database on a cloud somewhere or worry about constantly keeping your databases in sync. Whether you store it in Dropbox/OneDrive/Google/etc. or use LastPass or another service, there's always going to be some risk.

At present I still recommend LastPass because that way you can easily have everything synced on your computers, phone, etc., and it's easier to convince people to remember one strong password and let LastPass handle remembering all the other strong passwords no matter what device you're on.

Sure, with an offline password manager backups and synchronization are up to you, but even if you end up relying on cloud storage it's a different story; for instance, if you store your KeePass database on a Dropbox account and said Dropbox account gets breached, at least you know that unless there's a flaw in the encryption algorithm used by KeePass, the password database cannot be decrypted without the master password (and brute forcing it should be very impractical if the master password is good enough).

If you use service like LastPass or 1Password you can never be entirely certain that a breach or a security flaw in any of these services isn't going to expose your passwords. I'm sure they use the proper encryption measures, but like the Dropbox breach shows, shit happens and companies get hacked.

I'm not saying never use a cloud password manager, but understand that the added convenience comes with added risk; I would definitely not make my company depend on them.

There's really not much of a difference between syncing via Dropbox (or similar products) and cloud services with the following characteristics:

- Client-side encryption, meaning the service has no way to obtain your cleartext passwords (short of planting a backdoor, which is a vector that applies to all password managers).

- Full offline support, with the ability to export your database. This becomes relevant when the service is down, you're running into billing problems, or if the company goes out of business entirely.

- Availability of a native client (as opposed to web apps or extensions that act as a thin layer on top of a web app). Planting a backdoor that leaks your secrets is significantly harder when you also need to compromise the vendor's signing key, as opposed to just breaching their web server and adding some JS file.

I just sync my 1Password via WiFi between my phone, work computer and personal computer. It's really not that much work either. Well worth keeping the vault of the internet.

What tools do you use for syncing the files? Thanks.

1Password has this builtin to all their clients so nothing other than 1Password itself is used to sync.

Storing your keepass database to the cloud vs. Using Lastpass have very different inherent risks.

Even if Google or your Google drive is hacked, assuming you are using a strong passphrase for keypads, you are still OK.

If Lastpass is hacked, that's a different story.

Download a password manager like Keepass, Lastpass or Password Safe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_password_managers

I use Keepass, it does exactly what I need.

Secure the password manager itself with a long password. Put your logins into it, and generate a unique random password for each one, then go to the website in question and change the password to the new one.

When you want to login to that website, open your password manager, copy the password to your clipboard and paste it in. Remove the password from the clipboard (Keepass does this automatically after about 10 seconds).

That is ALL you need to do. You could get into using keys, etc, to secure the password manager but if you have a long, unique password for the password manager, it shouldn't be necessary. I'm sure others can provide you with info on how to finesse the process using online password managers, etc, but what I've just described is the basics. Start simple, ramp it up later if you're the paranoid type (which you should be ;)

EDIT: Another thing, if you can use two-factor authentication, do it. I use this on my Google accounts, Paypal and my bank.

https://www.google.com/landing/2step/

https://www.turnon2fa.com/tutorials/how-to-turn-on-2fa-for-p...

Another edit: You can store more in the password manager than just passwords. I keep a scan of my signature in there in case I have to put it into one of those (admittedly insecure) PDF-type forms to "verify" I've signed something. I also make up stupid answers to password hint questions and these also go in the password manager, e.g. "First school" -> "Dr Magnus Pike's School for Aspiring Arsonists". Too easy for people to work out what my real first school is called.

Yeah, I've been doing that same thing with security questions, except I just generate a new random password for each. I really wish that field was automatically blocked from view without the master password like the passwords themselves are when you toggle that (excellent) option.

Is Keychain Access from OSX a safe password manager?

Also, how comes all security-aware people trust 1Password and LastPass, even though they are not open source? Isn't that one of the rules of security, publish the source so we can trust it?

Another "rule of security" is that taking one step forward is better than nothing at all. So theoretically, a proprietary password manager could have a backdoor which could be used by the vendor or security services. But that's a relatively small group of people compared to "the whole world" which is where most people are with easily-guessed passwords which get reused everywhere.

Also, the idea that an army of trained security professionals is ready and able to scan open-source software for vulnerabilities isn't true - I think there was a study a few years ago which proved these security checks often didn't happen, people just assumed they did. The OpenSSH (secure shell) software was compromised for years and nobody noticed, and it is true open source and a critical part of people's systems as well.

You're looking to mitigate risks. A password manager is a step in the right direction. If you are truly paranoid (good for you) something like this, based on GPG, might be the right answer for you:

https://www.passwordstore.org/

Personally I prefer not to use cloud-based password managers because I don't know what their backend security is like. But those more knowledgeable than me might say "they're fine" because of the way the encryption is structured.

>all security-aware people trust 1Password and LastPass

I don't think this is true at all. Many people do not recommend using these services for exactly that reason. Plenty of so-called experts make lots of compromises in their choices and recommendations for various reasons.

I really dislike password managers and there's good news: you don't need one to have unique password per site. A good password algorithm is very useful:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/my-accounts-been-hacked-no-it-...

The article is dated. I'd suggest a longer minimum and 2 factor for services that support it. The advantage is unique passwords that you don't have to look up.

I used to do this before switching to a password manager; the problem with pattern-based passwords is that while in paper it sounds better than password reuse (unique passwords for each site/service while still being able to remember them, yay!) in practice you are still using the same pattern for all of them. A potential smart adversary could figure out the pattern used and then apply it to every site/service much like if the password was reused. E.g., if your facebook password is "j0hnf4c3b00k83", an adversary could easily guess that you are using a site/service pattern, and that your google password is "j0hng00gl383".

Of course, the pattern doesn't have to be that simple, but even if it were incredibly complex, at the end of the day you are still relying on one single pattern for all your passwords.

Right. But the idea does take advantage of the fact that some kinds of patterns are more obvious to humans and some to machines. Most people's threat model is a massive data breach rather than a determined single attacker focused on them who actually uses a smart human brain to analyze the passwords.

Exactly. If someone goes after you personally, they'd need several of your password (at least three or four) if you have a decent algorithm. Then they'd have to find that pattern.

Most password leverage comes from breaches and people running larger scale operations for scamming and spamming.

I use 1Password and I'm fairly happy with it. I also use dropbox for sync, since other methods suck. I didn't had a Dropbox account in 2012 so I'm not sure if I'm affected, but anyway, my 1Password chain should be secure even if stolen/accessed... That's what encryption is all about anyway.

I’ve always been under the impression the most secure and (technically) simple solution is to use the local system, like Keychain Access.

I wrote a small program that generates a list of random passwords. I just open terminal and type password, then copy/paste one of the outputs and allow Keychain Access to remember it. I do this for every service, the only manual password I use is for my actual computer, which is rotated periodically. You’ll need to manually backup your keychain file though.

This isn’t a friendly solution for most people.

http://ss64.com/pass/ Download the page to your desktop and you can use it offline.

What really bothers be about this is that Dropbox hasn't bothered to reset the sessions. Even after I manually reset my password (which I wasn't prompted or forced to do btw), all my apps (iPhone, desktop etc) that have existing sessions wasn't expired. So for all I know, a hacker might already have an open session to my Dropbox and changing the password will not fix that

Clarification edit: I did receive the e-mail from Dropbox letting me know that I should change my password, but when visiting dropbox.com I was already logged in and wasn't prompted to perform the pw reset

You can see all the existing sessions and authorised applications from their website. It is not perfect and it is extra work to go through those and delete them, but at least there is a way.

https://www.dropbox.com/account#security

Unlink the device to restart the session.

I'm a lead at Syncplicity, a prominent competitor. Early in my career at Syncplicity I changed all of our desktop clients to use long-lived sessions that do not reset when the user's password is changed.

For us, this is deliberate for a few reasons. Most of our customers authenticate via their employer's SSO (single sign on) and do not use any Syncplicity password management. We also do not believe that routine password maintenance should force someone to run around and re-authenticate all their computers. (Like Dropbox, a user can log into our web site and remove computers from their account.)

I do understand the argument that a password change should force a re-authentication on all clients; but I don't think it's the right approach. Changing a password is reactionary and preventative. An email notification will inform a user that his or her account is compromised.

Maybe one could add a checkbox to allow users to do that when they want to. My Skype password was recently hacked and I'm very very happy that I could via one command logout all the clients. Sometimes it's a feature you really really want to react fast.

Is there a way to force the clients to be disconnected? I'm not a customer of you or dropbox.

Personally I like a "revoke all clients" button in addition to the system you describe.

I recently unlinked all my Dropbox sessions that were older than one month, which was a staggeringly high number to tell the truth. It would have been nice (and faster!) to have had a "panic button" that let me unlink everything all at once and only relink the things I needed to relink.

How is it possible for Hashcat to crack a 20 character long random password in 6ms? That is mind boggling.

I thought he was just going to hash the password and see if it fit the leaked hash, but no, it looks like he actually did the reverse and cracked the hash to see if it fit the password, right?

Edit: oh it looks like he provided the password to hashcat in the form of a psudo 'dictionary' to use. So Hashcat was not really cracking it - just iterating through a 1 word dictionary - like he said.

No, he didn't crack it but just hashed it and checked for equality. So just what you would have expected.

He did it in a way that appears more complicated to people using Hashcat not as often as he probably does.

Hashcat used the real password as a single-entry password dictionary. So in order to "crack" the hash, it grabbed the first and single entry from its dictionary, hashed it, ... match!

Don't worry, this has been confusing to me and several people in the comments section on his website as well.

So we finally get validation of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300492

Self hosting is my way to go. Had enough of this.

> My wife uses a password manager. If your significant other doesn't (and I'm assuming you do by virtue of being here and being interested in security), go and get them one now! 1Password now has a subscription service for $3 a month and you get the first 6 months for free.

How about...not? There are tiny open source tools for every OS. You can do it locally, save it on a stick or on your damn phone...why taking more risks especially facing this massive fail here?

> Self hosting is the way to go.

Because you can secure it better than them? Or because you'll be less of a target?

It's not clear to me whether the grandparent is referring to self-hosting password management or file synchronisation. However, one obvious security advantage of self-hosting is that you can use end-to-end encryption (which most cloud sync services don't support).

E.g., I use Resilio Sync (formerly Bittorrent Sync) for file sync with encryption-only keys on my cloud peer. The cloud peer participates in the mesh, providing bandwidth, but if it gets hacked, no one can read the data.

(Of course, I would prefer an open source solution. SyncThing does not have the right sharing model for me. So I was thrilled to hear about LibreVault on HN, which provides functionality similar to BTSync 1.x: https://librevault.com)

Why not use firefox sync or chrome password sync? All data is locally encrypted before uploading.

Both.

> Resilio Sync (formerly Bittorrent Sync)

Good job they changed their name. Couldn't get the product adopted in a corporate environment because of all the cries of "Witch! Witch!" when the suits saw the word Bittorrent in there.

Indeed. And they spun out of Bittorrent Inc. completely, which is known for doing scammy things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ΜTorrent#Ads_and_malware

Arguably, this leak seems to have been the result of password reuse. If you store your data with millions of people and 200 employees have a way to access it, your are exposed to

1. An interesting phishing target for a hacker

2. Lots of employees who can fuck up, a hacker only needs one, one time

I'd say the probability you will be hacked is probably less if you use like a Synology with a reasonably strong password and automatic system updates.

For me, that would be most probably both if I were serious. Less of a target of course (I'm only one dude), but also much less attack surface. Basically install a trusty GNU/Linux or Open BSD, set up automatic updates, and block everything but SSH. Oh, and disable password based logins —use a public/private key pair of appropriate strength.

Or better yet, ask actual security experts about that setup, they're likely to come up with something better (just as simple and more secure).

Exactly my thoughts and I'm not alone here. There is a growing attitude against cloud infrastructure which together with the industries hype for it will lead to a interesting clash at some point.

I hope this will bring out even more cloudless solutions in the future.

This sounds like a simple setup the average HN spouse would have no trouble with at all.

I trust 1Password more than lastpass or keypassx.

Why?

They are a company focussing on just one commercial product.

Also I find there's some kind of pride in quality amongst mac-developers.

Plus the lastpass vulnerability that was disclosed a couple of month ago seemed pretty basic and I haven't heard from serious vulnerabilities in 1password for a while.

And that 1Password is local.

All of that is just a feeling though, of course.

> They are a company focussing on just one commercial product.

Or: "they are a company depending on just one commercial product".

Doesn't look that good anymore hm?

Try keepass for excample. It's local too and it's open source.

Keepass doesn't even serve it's updates over HTTPS, so who knows what i'm getting.

This fact alone make me lose all trust in it's developers.

There have been some articles about automatic KeePass updates being vulnerable. This section clarifies the situation and its resolution.

First of all, we would like to note that KeePass cannot update itself. KeePass does support checking for updates (optional; by downloading a version information file, comparing the available with the installed version number, and displaying a notification if necessary). However, it neither downloads nor installs any new version automatically. Users have to do this manually.

KeePass can be downloaded from many servers (SourceForge with its many mirror servers, FossHub, etc.). In order to make sure that the downloaded file is official, users should check whether the file is digitally signed (Authenticode; all KeePass binaries are signed, including the installer, KeePass.exe and all other EXE and DLL files). The digital signature can be checked using Windows Explorer by right-clicking the file -> 'Properties' -> tab 'Digital Signatures' (the expected signer name is 'Open Source Developer, Dominik Reichl'). When running the installer, the UAC dialog displays the digital signature information, i.e. users who carefully read the UAC dialog do not have to inspect the file properties separately. This is recommended for all users, independent of where you download KeePass from.

The KeePass website links to SourceForge for downloading KeePass. However, even if SourceForge (or the KeePass website) is compromised and serves a malicious download, users who check the digital signature will notice the attack and will not run the malware. Note that HTTPS cannot prevent an attack via a compromise of the download server; checking the digital signature does.

The version information file is downloaded from the KeePass website over HTTP. Thus a man in the middle (someone who can intercept your connection to the KeePass website) could have returned an incorrect version information file, possibly making KeePass display a notification that a new KeePass version is available. However, the next steps (downloading and installing the new version) must be carried out by the user manually, and here users who check the digital signature will notice the attack.

Resolution. In order to prevent a man in the middle from making KeePass display incorrect version information (even though this does not imply a successful attack, see above), the version information file is now digitally signed (using RSA-4096 and SHA-512). KeePass 2.34 and higher only accept such a digitally signed version information file. Furthermore, the version information file is now downloaded over HTTPS.

http://keepass.info/help/kb/sec_issues.html#updsig

> Or: "they are a company depending on just one commercial product". Doesn't look that good anymore hm?

Actually it does. They depend on selling their product to security-savy users, so they will ensure it's quality.

> They depend on selling their product to security-savy users

No they don't. They just need some good advertising and they can sell to people who didn't even know they need it (fear works very well here). Really tech savy users will just move on if they don't like something or won't even come in because it's not open source or because of data thrift. The untechy customer will stick to what he has.

On the other side: if there is just one company better then them, with better advertising they'll have to see how they can get money with just this product. There are many creative solutions out there. A sheer endless horizon of possibilities I don't even want to think about.

> They depend on selling their product to security-savy users, so they will ensure it's quality.

This is a dangerously naive attitude.

For me, it's that 1Password runs locally and doesn't need to phone home, whereas LastPass is "cloud". Also, LastPass being owned by LogMeIn doesn't sit right with me, but that's definitely personal.

No idea about Keepass(x), although I found that ecosystem to be confusing, with different apps for different platforms you might accidentally download a rouge one on e.g. your phone. I know, paranoia.

My mother is able to run keepass and she still has a problem with double clicking.

But sure. Looking for yourself is not easy. You have to do something for yourself and not just throw money on some company that is depending on this one product.

Not sure if your paranoia is directed the right way here though.

Just because the thing that works for another person isn't the same as what you do doesn't mean that you need to be insulting towards them.

LastPass is only "cloud" in the sense that it takes the AES encrypted files your browser encrypts locally, then allows you to access them from multiple locations if you have the right pw (and 2 factor auth if you use it).

Keepass isn't served over HTTPS.

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2016/06/keepass-vulnerability-l...

http://keepass.info/help/kb/sec_issues.html#updsig

There have been some articles about automatic KeePass updates being vulnerable. This section clarifies the situation and its resolution.

KeePass and KeepShare are both GPL, which is already a huge improvement over "trust this largely unknown company".

I use them too, and like how they operate. They have the best update notes of any company I've seen (on Apple's App store) - enthusiastic, entertaining, detailed, consistent. None of this guarantees quality, but it certainly paints a picture of a committed team.

that's true, but 1p is far better than the open source options. it also has wifi sync between devices, so your fault never leaves your devices via anything but trusted, local connections if that's what you want

How is this "far better"? It's just some additional feature you've described here. I wouldn't need it. So it does nothing better for me as far as I can see it.

  a subscription service 
  for $3 a month and you 
  get the first 6 months 
  for free.

...and now, a word from our sponsors.

And that puts your data in a (password) silo.

What sites does everyone have two step verification on? I'm trying to figure out where I need to setup two step verification that also accounts for a phone being stolen/lost.

Between gmail, dropbox (1password is synced here), and apple, I'm not sure where I should be enabling it. It seems like everywhere but gmail and apple is probably the right move...

Enable it everywhere you can, and just write down & guard the backup keys.

Also, I don't use it, but 1password can store and backup 2FA keys so you can theoretically recover from a lost phone that way, depending on how you store the 1password vault. Not a replacement for backup keys necessarily.

Generally agree here, but I'm thinking about real scenarios in which I may never be able to recover anything.

One scenario is traveling abroad and having my phone stolen/lost.

For an iPhone, a full backup via iTunes will include the authenticator app data, won't it?

And you'll be printing out emergency passwords when you set up two-factor either way.

It doesn't look like this works with the google authenticator app when restoring to a different device.

For emergency passwords, does that mean you're keeping a printed out copy with you when you travel?

yes.

Me: Google Github Dropbox Dreamhost Amazon (store) Amazon (AWS) Microsoft RamNode Twitter Apple Facebook

Why wouldn't you enable it on Google and Apple? Those seem like the most important. You print out the backup codes and keep them safe.

I definitely want to enable it on the most important accounts, but I worry about the scenario where I lose my phone/wallet when traveling abroad.

I wonder if they got the seeds ('secret key' in [1]) for the 2FA as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC-based_One-time_Password_A...

This hack precedes the introduction of 2FA on Dropbox:

https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2012/07/security-update-ne...

Great read.

He goes on to say that 1Password has a subscription now and that you should signup for it.

No. I will never, ever put all my passwords into a cloud based password store. I simply do not trust them to not fuck it up at one point in time.

Am I alone with this view?

1Password is not cloud based...

https://1password.com/privacy/

For some products, they are.

"Your vaults, items, and documents are fully encrypted in your 1Password Families and 1Password Teams and stored on our servers."

I wonder why the SHA1s don't have the salt. Were they removed so that only the original owners have it so it's easier to crack?

Oh well, another HIBP entry with my email address...

Funny, I just got an email a week ago saying they had noticed my password hadn't been changed in awhile (2012, which was interesting based on the article). Sounds like they knew about this and beefed up security.Or, they beefed up security on newer passwords but didn't cut over the old ones? The email did not mention any data theft, kinda wish it did. Too little, too late.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Dropbox's bug bounty program: https://hackerone.com/dropbox

You have to wonder if all those grumbling whitehats were on to something when they said bug bounties should pay a lot more than what they do and that there IS a black market interest for them.

I suppose this is off topic, but I checked one of my email addresses on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and found a LinkedIn hack from May 2016.

Thing is I've deleted my LinkedIn account thrice in 2013. They have no right to stop have my email after that long.

The hack is from September 2012. LinkedIn knew about it in May 2016.

OK. Thank you, HN. I just discovered that I've been pwned on Dropbox breach. If that happened in 2012, and I am using 1Password sync over Dropbox, does that mean that all my passwords stored in 1Password.pif in 2012 were compromised too? Probably yes.

Why isn't Dropbox reporting this? I'd have more respect for them if they were more honest about this.

They were preparing to start IPO, so they must be very careful with words they use now.

They told us a week ago https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2016/08/resetting-password...

They sent both me and my wife an email a couple of days ago regarding this, and have a Help Center page[0] for it:

    Hi <first name>,
    
    We’re reaching out to let you know that if you haven’t
    updated your Dropbox password since mid-2012, you’ll be
    prompted to update it the next time you sign in. This is
    purely a preventative measure, and we’re sorry for the
    inconvenience.

    To learn more about why we’re taking this precaution,
    please visit this page on our Help Center. If you have
    any questions, feel free to contact us at
    password-reset-help%dropbox.com.

    Thanks,
    The Dropbox Team

[0]: https://www.dropbox.com/help/9257

Thanks. Found the email in my junk folder. Cool, glad they sent something.

4 years late, though...

Well, thank goodness I got robbed after 2012, which caused me to change all my passwords everywhere. Else I don't think I would've ever gotten around to changing my Dropbox password, as it's just a long string of randomness.

So besides resetting the password, should one also unlink devices and apps?

You should probably audit the list and disconnect any you don't recognize, but you should probably be doing that periodically anyway with everything...

I've never trusted dropbox, cloud etc. They drive me paranoia. :/

If find this just interesting that just last week my steam account was successfully logged in from Russia (I'm in the UK). Looks like I forgot about Steam to make my passwords stronger.

I turn on 2FA wherever I can now. If only steam supported modern 2FA and not sending a code via email.

Agree. If they support Google Authenticator, even better. Sometimes the text messages don't come through.

They do-- IF you own an Android or iOS phone. If you own a Windows Phone, you're just screwed.

How can I tell if someone has accessed my account / files?

Hmm, my account appears on HIBP, but Dropbox haven't asked me to change my password on login... Who to believe? (probably not Dropbox)

Recently I had received an email from Dropbox asking me to change my password and now I read about the hack , I wonder if there is any correlation here.

It never ceases to amaze me how people have bought into "cloud" computing. Its hard enough to protect your own data, on your own secure machine. Once you entrust your data to a third party you should have absolutely no doubt that it is at risk. The larger the organization that that third party is, the more inherently insecure it is. In the cloud, it only takes one careless, stupid, or inept person to expose the data of thousands (or millions). And you can't fix stupid.

No thanks, I'll keep control over my own data.

I guess it depends on the data we are talking about?

I have a huge photo library, but I'm not a professional photographer. I'm not going to sell any of the photos I have on my computer. So when Apple told me I could offload all that data to the cloud, and worry about it less (from a backup perspective), I said "absolutely".

Sensitive data is more problematic. But the vast majority of people aren't handling "sensitive" data.

>I guess it depends on the data we are talking about?

Absolutely it depends.

> But the vast majority of people aren't handling "sensitive" data.

I don't think that is necessarily true, but it would depend on how you define "sensitive". If you are storing data in the cloud that you are happy sharing with the public, then security isn't an issue. However, many people backup all of their data in the cloud (you need look no further then OneDrive that comes with every copy of Windows 10). This includes their financial information, tax returns, intimate personal information, and other things that would horrify them if they were exposed to the public. Most do so without understanding the risks because cloud computing has been sold so heavily by the government, corporations, and media outlets.

And we aren't just talking about individuals. Many, if not most, corporations use cloud computing to store their data. This includes financial data, customer information, credit cards, account numbers, and everything else you can imagine.

I'm not trying to argue cloud computing doesn't have its uses. I have no problem using the Steam cloud to save my game in Civilization 5, regardless of how insecure their servers are. But the risks are very real any time you entrust your data (or anything else) to a third party, and they should be recognized.

btw Argon2 https://github.com/P-H-C/phc-winner-argon2 is better than bcrypt for passwords hashing

Use unique passwords ffs.

Tannerah@gmail.com

HIBP says I was pwnd. So ... like ... what do I do now?

SHA-1 hashes should still be okay, right?

Change your passwords; especially if you use the same password for many things.

you're not alright, we have a way of knowing if that was your password or not and having unlimited tries with unlimited processing power, which means it's a matter of time before someone is able to guess their way into your accounts.

Change your password at Dropbox and any sites you re-use that password on (which you really shouldn't be doing).

@dang Can we please change the URL to not have the query parameters?

I'd go with automatically stripping all utm_* query parameters from all URLs.

What's the harm?

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I do it with this extension: https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector/

Sorry about that, I submitted the link directly from my RSS feed. I'll trim that stuff if I submit in the future.

Why these troyhunt guys place a clickbait to hibp in every article? Don't be sick

Well, let's reply to the obvious troll.

Troy Hunt is a person, not a team, and I guess he links to HIBP because he's proud of his work. I know I would.

You forgot to add that it is also an incredibly valuable service for times like these that is totally free.

At this point I'd say signing up for notifications with it is just a solid security practice.

Because that is one mans war to help millions who have been pawned.

What's the big deal? It's not like it allows attackers to directly modify files on anyone's computer if they have Dropbox installed.

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