Hacker News Reader

Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a reasonably well written anecdote by someone who has some idea what they're talking about. It could obviously be false, but the consequences if he's right are potentially serious for a lot of HN users who might use LastPass. The consequences if he's wrong are a little extra reputational damage for LastPass, but that seems like a worthwhile tradeoff here.

Not everything posted on HN has to be verified true. The decision calculus here seems strongly in favor of signal boosting it, so that people who need to can take defensive action, even if it turns out to be wrong.

View on HN

It's like a novice programmer blaming the compiler for a bug in their application. It's very unlikely to be true. What would you have the people who are using LastPass do, stop using it? Because some crypto dude stored their highly valuable keys in a system that literally copies their keys to any system they log into, to systems that are notorious for having very leaky abstractions and vast vulnerability surfaces?

> It's like a novice programmer blaming the compiler for a bug in their application.

The big difference between the two examples is this: LastPass is known to have bugs. Huge amounts of data were stolen from them and we just found out that it was a lot more than we thought.

For all we know, they were storing passwords in the clear somewhere.

Trivia note: the first compiled language I used was PL/I, and the compiler was notoriously buggy and would crash on well-formed programs. Our teacher told us to put do-nothing statements in when this happened (`PUT SKIP(0);` if I recall correctly), and with some trial and error, those would fix it.

> What would you have the people who are using LastPass do, stop using it?

Yes. After their last major breach I exported all my data and deleted all my credentials and account with LastPass. Seeing the details of this breach, I'm super happy I did.

I eh.. was not up to date, I blame our office Christmas party. I guess I'm moving our organization over next year..

I meant the major breach before this one, I believe that was the one that gave attackers access to their dev environment, which they used to steal the developer credentials they used to make this attack.

I don't agree that was enough of a reason to drop them. An attacker getting access to your dev environment, even if you're one of the largest security focus endeavours, is pretty much an inevitability. Someone's gonna get access to one of your engineers macbooks, no matter what.

The thing that's bad, is that apparently their developers have access to (backups off) production data. That implies that their security infrastructure is not different from regular startups at all so all of their marketing is just bullshit. They didn't sacrifice developer productivity for security on this point, so they can't be trusted to have sacrificed anything for security at any point.

But you don't know if they deleted all the backups. You'll never be sure you are safe.

It's a solid point, you really need to rotate all the credentials to be safe. I did that for the important accounts and don't share passwords between accounts. I'm sure there are still a few accounts here amd there that might be at risk.l, especially since it was specifically the backups that were compromised.

> It's like a novice programmer blaming the compiler for a bug in their application.

No it isn’t.

> What would you have the people who are using LastPass do, stop using it?

Yes.

> Because some crypto dude…

No?

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/lastpass-say...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/09/16/google-w...

https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/lastpass-2019-pas...

"Well written"

That's subjective and has no value in determining whether the post is true.

"Not everything posted on HN has to be verified true. The decision calculus here seems strongly in favor of signal boosting it, so that people who need to can take defensive action, even if it turns out to be wrong."

What? Proven true, no, any sort of evidence, yes. As for taking actions, there's a cost.

> someone who has some idea what they're talking about

"I suspected someone used a 0day on me" is not exactly inspiring confidence

Why not? I have a security background. I see nothing wrong with that statement. Although what he actually said was:

"Initially I imagined I was targeted by a 0day or rootkit"

which actually does not make sense, because it implies he thinks those two things are fungible. He's obviously not a security expert, but he's also obviously not totally technically incompetent.

It's quite unlikely someone would risk burning a viable 0day without either going wide (and then we would've heard from a few more people) or going after a well outlined target that would be guaranteed to be worth more than the 0day itself.

I guess my prior based on the way this guy was talking was that he probably had at least 6-7 figures in crypto stolen, which is worth it for a mid tier 0day. Especially if you think it's unlikely to actually get burnt.

The person in question is very wealthy. I know at one point his portfolio was 9 figures. That may have been at the peak of the bull market but I imagine path is still very rich. Is it worth a 0day, still not sure.

If you have a security background then you know that 0days go for 6-7 figures and it's unlikely somebody would burn one of those on some random dude.

Way to make yourself feel important. It's not that you made some terrible choices yourself, like using a known-insecure password manager SaaS, or putting real money into crypto. Nono, somebody pulled a 0day on me, what can ya do? Shrugs

To explain your comment a bit: It should be 0 day AND a rootkit, not OR. Plus the rootkit is not always needed or possible.

Also the people talking about “burning zero days”… every time you use an exploit (ignoring the exact meaning of 0 days) it doesn’t become burned by the first person. The hacker could use it on hundreds of people before it’s discovered and patched by whatever software it targets. That could take months.

It can certainly be "or": rootkits can come from your machine's supply chain, and lie mostly dormant for many months or years before activation. Rootkits can get installed after a non-zero-day-entrypoint vector e.g. simply tricking the user into running downloaded malware. etc.

Someone who has any idea what they're talking about in this case would have used a hardware wallet.

> The losses are not significant.

That together with others here claiming they have a LOT, makes me think they might have hot, cold, soft and hardware wallets.

Fair enough. Serves me right for not reading the op for once.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com