Critical PayPal Security Hack: Multiple Thefts Now Reported–Check Your Settings
forbes.com
forbes.com
> But in terms of the Fenske and Mayer disclosure, the researchers told me that this is not fixed, even after PayPal’s “mitigation” statement.
If Paypal has known about it for a year and it still isn't fixed, then it means that either 1. Paypal didn't understand the bug report and "fixed" something else 2. Paypal understood the bug report, didn't fix it, and is trying to save face. Either one of those sounds pretty bad for their security policy...
These are both bad practice. The password length limit reduces the quality of passwords, and suggests plain-text storage of passwords. The sending of log-in links makes people much easier to phish, since people are used to clicking on a link in e-mail and then entering their credentials on the site.
click.csnpenslsc.ca
csnpe-nslsc.cibletudes-canlearn.ca
nslsc.ca
app.studentlending.ca
protege-secure.csnpe-nslsc.canada.ca
However, it is the first reason that comes to mind when this kind of limitation exists.
My most generous explanation of this scheme is that, at some point, paypal used plaintext as the backend for authentication. Now when they moved to a better scheme for the backend they never updated the length limit. Then this limit of 24 slowly invaded all code on the front-end of auth and changing it is seen as to big an issue. I'd expect some reasons like 'longer passwords are harder to remember' and 'network performance' are probably used internally as rationalizations for why no one starts trying to fix this.
Alternatively, they could really believe in a 'long passwords are harder to remember' or 'long passwords would induce a lot of performance overhead'. However, as far as I know, there are no reasons that fall anywhere near 'best practice' that would support a password length limit of 24.
The only time length matters is if the hashing algorithm has a limit (which is usually pretty high), or if you're storing these values encrypted/plain text.
The passwords being stored encrypted with a fixed length cyphertext would make 24 a weird number. That would suggest something like AES-192. Without storing the IV in the same field. Moreover, encrypted passwords are worse than hashed passwords. Because it means you need to secure the encryption key. Whereas with a salted hash, there is only brute force for recovering plain-text passwords.
The current best practice is for people to use passphrases rather than complicated passwords. For this, a password length limit of 24 is simply not enough.
There's no reason PayPal is excluded from this.
Enjoy: https://github.com/plaintextoffenders/plaintextoffenders/blo...
It's not difficult to find them
Plaintext password storage definitely still is common, unfortunately, but you're not going to see it at a place like Paypal or Bank of America or Stripe in 2020. Or even 2010.
No, it limits the effectiveness of passphrases.
It does not suggest or not suggest plaintext storage.
PayPal needs to seriously reevaluate how they want to approach the vulnerabilities. Why have a bounty program if you are going to act hostile towards the white hat community or even ignore their reports?
Note that here, Paypal paid a substantial bounty a year ago.
“We reported this in February 2019 to PayPal via HackerOne,” they say. “After an initial rejection and several discussions, PayPal paid a bug bounty of $4,400.” The pair have not heard from PayPal, they say, since April 2019. But this week “tried and could still use the virtual credit card for online payments.” That means, they told me, “the bug has not been fixed.”
To reiterate the OP, what is the point of a bug bounty program that ignores or fails to address reported issues?
> The two stories are unrelated
They are related in the sense that both stories show a failure to respond to reported issues.
> Note that here, Paypal paid a substantial bounty a year ago.
They paid but didn’t fix the issue? This is not taking account security serious at all.
At best, PayPal has a critical flaw in their bug bounty program.
This seems curiously confident given that just about every single one of your many comments on the other story was inaccurate or a misinterpretation.
So you don’t think that sending a bug bounty reward a year ago to a security researcher who exposed a flaw, that is still being exploited to take money from people, is a critical flaw in the program?
Do I think your 'motivated googling' approach to analyzing either story is likely to produce worthwhile insight? Not really. We've already seen it be remarkably inaccurate.
Great! You’re in agreement!
$4400 is not a substantial bounty for a bug of this severity, compared to the value on the black market. Like, the article even cites that attackers have extracted over $1000 from some individuals, multiply by thousands of users.
The black market value of this exploit is certainly into the hundreds of thousands.
Vulnerabilities are worth money in markets when they fit into pre-existing business/operational models. That's why clientside RCE in popular clients is valuable: multiple competing buyers have whole operational frameworks where new RCEs are drop-in compatible. Nobody speculatively builds new business models around the prospect of a random serverside vulnerability.
Maybe a vulnerability like this has value --- we don't know what it is, or how much interaction is required, or how quickly it could have been killed --- if it directly produces cash every time it's applied. But that's still a maybe for a serverside vulnerability with a half-life of epsilon.
Meanwhile: $4400 is a strong bounty for a serverside logic vulnerability. Serious vulnerabilities like stored XSS have bounty values in the hundreds of dollars despite the fact that people on HN seem to think they're worth 6 figures on some hypothetical black market.
I have no opinion about how Paypal handled this vulnerability after paying up for it; I'm exclusively interested in how this story intersects with yesterday's Paypal thread, which was a shitshow.
This is something that is routinely done already with credit card fraud. This is how thieves "cash out" the cards they steal with skimmers at gas pumps and stores.
The angle here is that they no longer need to steal your digits with a skimmer, they can just use your contactless payment wallet, because Paypal didn't lock them down properly. Or so the researchers allege (they don't give the exact details of the vuln for obvious reasons).
You're also only responding to a fraction of my argument. Even for clientside RCE, alternate market buyers don't pay full freight in a lump sum: they tranche payments because they know vendors will eventually kill the vulnerability and nobody is sure how long that will take. Here, you have a vulnerability where you'd more or less have to get paid royalties from direct fraud, because, again, Paypal can presumably kill the bug instantly.
If you have more specific details on the vulnerability that will enable you to make a clearer case for how this could drop into a system of repeated profitable attacks, provide them. I'm interested in hearing them.
Otherwise, my default response to people saying "this bounty is too cheap because the black market would pay 10x for it" is "yeah, sure, and for logout CSRFs too".
I wish journalists would ridicule this corporate bullshit lingo instead of just relaying it. I'm fairly certain that anyone that ever had contact with PayPal's (or Amazon's, or probably any other large corporation's) customer service with issues regarding security can attest that it's absolutely not one of their top priorities.
They haven't even bothered to make their official emails not look like phishing attempts. They don't care about security.
It should be challenged and ridiculed. That is the journalist's duty, and they failed.
Their job is not to be a copy and paste machine for company press releases.
It's one thing if the company is outright lying, but PR blather doesn't really count (for all that it's pointless and annoying.) In any event, yeah, if they want to editorialize, that's fine but it's done in a separate "Editorial" section. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editorial )
Letting the PR speech stand by itself without large red arrows pointing at the absurdity gives it way too much power imho.
It's the opinion of the journalist: is this information worth writing about?
It's the opinion of the editor: is this part worth changing?
It's the opinion of the publisher: is this piece worth publishing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_reply
> The right of reply or right of correction generally means the right to defend oneself against public criticism in the same venue where it was published. In some countries, such as Brazil, it is a legal or even constitutional right. In other countries, it is not a legal right as such, but a right which certain media outlets and publications choose to grant to people who have been severely criticised by them, as a matter of editorial policy.
You might not like it but it is a thing.
And if they choose to defend themselves with a load of PR doublespeak BS, well, that's also news, eh?
If the reporter adds "...which is obviously bullshit." at the end that's the difference between journalism and a SNL sketch. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9qblOghuKk )
Man, now that you mention about it, I thought the same thing every time I see an email from PayPal and just disregarded the thought because it's so common from websites and nobody cares. It's _literally_ the business model of some of the top email marketing companies.
In either case, now that you mention it, I don't think it was mentioned in yesterday's six vulns disclosed or in today's.
I've disabled the client-side check using the browser's developer tools and my email was accepted by the server upon submission, so I could finally claim my 5 euros :P.
All of this was preceded by me contacting support about adding my email address. They couldn't help me and told me to contact the sender, which would have been impossible, since it was a donation, and the only thing I had was a PayPal notification about a pending payment to that email address.
Of course the server should have accepted the email anyway, because it was valid, the issue just highlights a faulty development process at PayPal that allows server-side validation to be more permissive than client-side validation.
What are those "multiple reports"? I see the source is golem.de (don't get me started on that one) and "multiple reports" can just mean that less than half a dozen people got busted on their Google accounts for not using proper 2FA in that context.
Also the article states that Google Pay provides a virtual credit card when used with PayPal. How? All I saw up until now was virtual debit cards.
Naming confusion, I think. To some people (mostly Americans), credit and debit cards are the same thing - just plastic payment cards. Some Europeans think Visa/Mastercard can only be credit cards (they can be either credit or debit).
To me, the difference is that credit cards use the bank's/issuer's balance (that you can pay back later, all at once or spread out in smaller monthly payments), while debit cards use your bank account balance directly. I think that's the proper differentiation.
Anyone who's been stuck on SMS may wish to login and switch over to TOTP.
Also, this is 2020, where is WebAuthN? That would at least make the constant 2FA a bit more bearable.
I'm fine with this. I'd rather take the 3 seconds it takes to open Authy than the several days it takes to clean up the mess.
For someone who uses PayPal for most online payments this can be extremely tedious.
> For someone who uses PayPal for most online payments this can be extremely tedious.
To rephrase that: the quantity can range from "almost every online payment" to "every online payment". If, like many people, you try to use PayPal for most payments to avoid credit card info leakage, that means you need to answer a TOTP challenge on every payment.
Apple have a similar option BUT they restrict its use to certain payment terminals (for example it is only supposed by TfL in the UK) and can be disabled if you want. Dunno if the data it exposes (in a physical read attack) could be used for other payments.
> With Express Transit mode enabled, you don't have to validate with Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode when you pay for rides with Apple Pay on your iPhone and Apple Watch. And you don't need to wake or unlock your device, or open an app.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV
[2] https://www.eftlab.com/knowledge-base/145-emv-nfc-tags/
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.dev...