Data breach exposes 184M passwords, likely captured by malware
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
> Based on his analysis, Fowler determined the data was captured by some kind of infostealer malware.
Then the mere exposure of the file and whether it was encrypted is irrelevant. The data was already stolen, the damage was already done.
I believe the industry should work towards mandating communication on these incidents instead of maintaining the charade that nothing is happening. This needs to come through one of legislation or labor action.
The data was already breached. The irony is that this would likely "unbreach" the data breach as the companies would likely lock the account.
It's frustrating that he offers no information about where the data was taken from, or any way of checking if my passwords are compromised.
Also, strangely no discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44062726
I'd love a source that at least gave the full list of compromised services.
Do security researchers really contact people willy-nilly and ask them to confirm their passwords? Then they lecture us about the dangers of social engineering?
In fact, they're doing the honorable thing and not simply trying the credentials to see if they work.
The reason - over time I started renting an apartment there, the reputation and stream of guests is simply too big wall to climb over (I mean it can be done easily but it would hurt financially pretty bad).
Now I cant get rid of that cancer that facebook is. 10 years ago it didnt seems so, my mistake, should have seen it coming.
Is truly separate accounts for everything really doable?
> I disclaim any and all liability for any and all actions that may be taken as a result of this disclosure.
Of the list, I only have a Facebook PW, but I tried to delete that ID years ago without luck. I have not be in it in ages.
If some here gets that PW, please delete my Facebook Account :)
It is such a pathetic state of affair where massive leaks like these are expected. I contend this is a result of lax regulation and lack of consequences. In healthcare, patient data are locked down so hard even people who need to work with them have problems getting to them. It is because of regulations. Everything is traceable, recorded, and maintained to the strictest standards possible. It costs a huge amount of money but as a result, we don't see many serious breaches.
Compared it to fintech and regular tech services, these guys make fuckton of profits and yet suffer almost no regulations. What a joke.
Install a password manager. It's the perfect piece of software. It's not only so much more secure, but it's just a more pleasant experience in every single way. It's very rare that the secure option is more convenient.
Also, when they now found themself on have i been powned, they have a bigger problem, because they have likely malware on the phone or computer.
Then proper OS security is needed to protect authentication tokens from being stolen by malware.
Security Keys. Your mother and siblings have seen keys before right? They can understand the metaphor and use it. Several of the accounts listed, such as Google and Facebook allow Security Keys.
Bad guys can't steal the credentials out of Security Keys the way they'd steal say passwords or a TOTP code, they would need to physically obtain access to the keys, your mother and siblings almost certainly don't face adversaries who'll break into their homes or hold them at gunpoint, just ordinary online automated attacks.
And my main argument is that corporations can do better. We should not put the burden on the common folks when the ones who are in the positions to do something are not pulling their weight. Sure, this will reduce their profit, and probably their share prices, and as a result, dev's compensation. Maybe that is the hardest part to argue through.
If your grandma knows how to insert a key into a lock then she will be able to insert a key into a phone.
My limited understanding is that the key is on their phone (let's say it's a Google key, on an Android phone). When their phone gets lost, stolen, or breaks, are they screwed? This worries me because the chances of the phone being lost is high.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/YubikeyMos...
You may be thinking of "passkeys" and while a security key can be a form of passkeys, the ones generated for your mum will be on her device, yes.
A passkey is a shortcut, for now. Relying on a passkey being in place is another good way to forget your password. ;-)
That puts a lot of burden on users though.
Maybe start a pilot automated service run by Google or Microsoft or whoever where backup codes are securely sent to local credit unions and it's all almost transparent to the user. They just need to either pick up the code at the credit union and put it in their safety deposit box or approve that last step.
I'm not upset at all about banking working with private entities or any of the past with banks. I'm mostly upset because some of these ideas are good, you know? Maybe not this, but some. For a short while longer.
If you do go with a security key it’s typically recommended to have at least 2 so that if one dies or is lost both have the same level of access. So long as you add them both/all to every account you need to access.
The problem with these is, they can get lost, stolen, damaged or misplaced. With a physical key to the home, no problem - call up a locksmith and if you don't have an ID card also the police, he'll drill out the lock and you can enter your home back.
Google, Facebook, whatever - good luck trying to get into touch with a human to reset your "security key".
edit:
I remember thinking in the 90's that it was weird as hell that the operating system sits in the same folder tree as the users documents, applications live there too! What a concept? Like keeping your socks in the same drawer as your bills and plumbing tools. Spare tire in the kitchen. Lawn mower under the bed.
Would these companies leak their own business critical documents? No. So why can't they be forced to treat sensitive customer's data the same way?
The data was stolen from the users' computers, by malware installed by the users themselves.
CHS lost millions of records, was fined a few million (out of profit of 1.2 billion) UCLA similar. Bunch of others I don't think even got fined like Ascension recently lost all data in a ransomware attack
It's useful going after a rogue employee, but on an org level it's security theater
...and one of the side-effects is that it contributes to the insane price of healthcare.
Effective regulation, like security, is about finding the sweet spot between security and efficiency. It's extremely easy to turn off your brain and say that nobody has access to the data (which makes it perfectly secure/private) - but obviously that's an insane approach. It's hard, but extremely important, to actually maximize the security-efficiency product.
PII should not have the regulations that are currently applied to healthcare/PHI - it'd massively increase the costs (both financial, and worker/individual productivity) of doing everything. It needs a better regulation model that is designed to maximize the security-efficiency product.
Most likely, the best model is one that focuses more on outcomes (huge penalties for leaking PII, along with a few things like chain of custody for user data (which I don't think that even HIPAA does) - not to exclude regulation of process of course) than processes (HIPAA describing in excruciating and unnecessary detail all of the ways that you have to process PHI - which include RESTRICTING THE WAYS THAT I CAN MANAGE MY OWN HEALTH DATA).
The cost to develop a drug is in the billions. Manufacturing costs are in the tens to hundreds of millions. Locking down some server and implement better security would be a drop in a bucket.
And even if it was more expensive, the biggest pharma megacorps are a fraction of the size of the like of tech megacorps. If the chumps down the street can do it as a side job, why can't the big boys whose entire business is supposedly about data and software can't do better?
I did not state that it was solely due to that. Please read my comment carefully:
> ...and one of the side-effects is that it contributes to the insane price of healthcare.
Meanwhile, this is a crazy red herring:
> The cost to develop a drug is in the billions. Manufacturing costs are in the tens to hundreds of millions.
The cost for smaller practices and procedures that have nothing to do with drugs or manufacturing has skyrocketed.
It's not very hard to understand that the primary cost of regulation is on smaller businesses and practices. Regulation imposes a disproportionate cost on smaller organizations, leading to consolidation. This is a bad thing. The results of regulation can be a net benefit if you reduce those costs while maximizing the positive effects. This should be incredibly obvious.
Moreover, this is a rather uninformed claim:
> Locking down some server and implement better security would be a drop in a bucket.
That's not how HIPPA works. HIPPA prescribes that you have to use certain HIPPA-compliant services and technologies. That's not a cost burden - that's a compliance burden. It's not enough for your systems to be secure - they have to be HIPPA-compliant, which is so insanely difficult for small practices to do in-house that it forces all of them to use large, expensive, complex medical platforms, and pushes many others to consolidate with larger hospitals in order to amortize the overhead of managing these systems. And guess what? Consolidation in markets without extremely strict anti-monopoly enforcement leads to higher prices and worse products and services.
Yes, the cost of actually running the servers is very low. But that's almost never the primary cost of regulation - that's straight-up factually false. The primary cost of regulation is the overhead of compliance.
That's why any sane person strives to maximize the security-efficiency product, or the analog in whatever area you're trying to regulate.
There's literally no excuse for not trying to do this, or for defending the idea that we shouldn't take efficiency into account when designing regulation, except malice.
> If the chumps down the street can do it as a side job
Yes, and as is incredibly obvious to everyone, healthcare is orders of magnitude more expensive than services provided by those tech megacorps. This is evidence (even if weak), that bad regulation makes things more expensive, not less.
> why can't the big boys whose entire business is supposedly about data and software can't do better?
You clearly did not read my whole comment. I'm not arguing that regulation isn't necessary. I'm pointing out the fact that you have to optimize the security-efficiency product, and NOT do what HIPPA does, which is maximize security at the cost of a very high amount of efficiency to the point where it infringes on patient rights.
The only absurd comment here is the one that did not actually read what it was responding to, and is mostly composed of red herrings, claims that don't line up with reality, and logical fallacies.
They decide your medications you can prescribe, when you prescribe them, who can have them, how long your visits will be, when you should have those visits, how many visits you need to make a diagnosis, and on and on and on and on. Every single detail - multiplexed across thousands of insurers.
So, you need administration, and lots of it. The system is so horribly fragmented that all hopes of efficiency are lost. A single-payer solution is orders of magnitude more simple, and thereby more efficient. A lot of problems just go away when you only have one person doling out recommendations, one person doing care, and one person paying.
Also, the doctors who are making most of the decisions around your care aren't the doctors you go to. It's dozens of doctors, mostly nameless, working for your insurer making those decisions. How this isn't considering practicing medicine is beyond everyone.
You're misattributing the cause of the complexity. The cause of the complexity is not due to the existence of private insurance, but the fact that it's changed from being insurance, that insures you against catastrophic financial loss due to an expensive surgery (that is, risk pooling), to a subsidization layer that permeates all healthcare, including routine visits to the doctor. That is what causes the complexity, because then you're right, that change evolves a massive amount of paperwork that imposes huge burdens on small businesses.
> Every single detail - multiplexed across thousands of insurers.
This is false, intentionally or not. Smaller practices rarely interact with more than a dozen insurers or so insurers, by the very nature of the fact that they're small, so this is off by about two orders of magnitude.
> A single-payer solution is orders of magnitude more simple, and thereby more efficient.
...and by "single payer" you mean the patients, right?
I have several years of working with a large federal government. Unless you're referring to a small state like Finland, the idea that a large government managing healthcare payments will make things "orders of magnitude more simple" is so naive as to be beyond laughable. The government makes even the most simple things (filling out paperwork to be reimbursed for staying in a hotel for a single night) insanely complex, and take far longer, and use far more resources (funded by taxpayers), than it does in private industry.
Yes, you're right that the interface between the medical practice and the insurance system becomes less complex when you have a single insurer, but the actual handling of claims becomes orders of magnitude more complex with the government, so the claim that it'll become "more efficient" is an extreme stretch.
If you live in the US, it's already trivially false, as it's extremely easy to see how incredibly inefficient many of the federal agencies are (I'm not going to use non-Western countries as other examples). Those agencies perform necessary functions, which is why they still have to exist, but anyone remotely familiar with the US government knows how bad of an idea it would be for it to handle health insurance. If they manage to figure out how to manage bureaucracy at a large scale, then single-payer health insurance becomes feasible. But until then, any suggestion of it is either extremely naive or flatly malicious.
I agree with you, but IMO it's completely unavoidable.
The concept of health insurance in strict terms of insurance was never possible. Not long term, anyway. Health is complex and chronic conditions cost a lot of money over a lifetime. The idea of insurance "just in case" doesn't work, period. Health is fundamentally different from car accidents or home hail damage.
> Smaller practices rarely interact with more than a dozen insurers or so insurers, by the very nature of the fact that they're small, so this is off by about two orders of magnitude.
Sure, but which dozen insurers they interact with isn't the same place to place. There's not a ton of knowledge transfer or business practice reuse here. You need billing specialists. So, across the entire industry of small private practices, it is thousands of insurers.
> The government makes even the most simple things (filling out paperwork to be reimbursed for staying in a hotel for a single night) insanely complex
Right, but the reason these tasks because insanely complex is because they're taken and split into 1 million pieces, which are then scattered across multiple levels of government, multiple agencies, multiple private contractors, who then have their own contractors, and multiple laws across multiple decades.
Our government, the US government, is not centrally planned where it matters. Every chance we get, we outsource as much as possible to the private sector. So one problem will become 1 thousand.
The simple reality is that the US has the worst healthcare system in the developed world, and it's not even close. Not only is our healthcare more expensive per person including taxes, it's also significantly worse with worse health outcomes across the board.
Every other developed country figured it out, and so can we. That doesn't mean it will be easy. But that's the truth - our system sucks, and it's because the private sector is far too involved in healthcare. We need to consolidate and collapse multiple parts of the system into one, and the complexity will go down.
The US has a poor government culture and mindset. We really thrive and actually want the inefficiency. It's the military shovel problem. We could produce a shovel for 20 bucks, but we want jobs, no? So we go ahead and outsource that to the private sector so we can get out 150 dollar military grade shovel, and it probably sucks, but we made a lot of people rich in the process. Each little hop from party to party represents a small increase in complexity and a little bit of cash shaven off the top. So naturally, we try to maximize the amount of parties involved. The best part is those contractors aren't even doing the work themselves - they're probably sub-contracting it out for god knows how many levels.
But, this can be fixed. It's not a foundational or necessary part of our government, it's a deliberate choice we make. Other countries don't make this choice, or do it much less.
That's not really relevant. An individual small practice only has to deal with a very small fraction of that total count, and that's all that really matters.
> Right, but the reason these tasks because insanely complex is because they're taken and split into 1 million pieces, which are then scattered across multiple levels of government, multiple agencies, multiple private contractors, who then have their own contractors, and multiple laws across multiple decades.
> Our government, the US government, is not centrally planned where it matters. Every chance we get, we outsource as much as possible to the private sector. So one problem will become 1 thousand.
This is categorically wrong and indicative that you've never worked in the US federal government.
Even tasks entirely handled within a single agency are insanely complex.
This has literally nothing to do with contractors or outsourcing to the private sector, which you appear to be incorrectly pinning the blame on for the complexity.
This is a mix between some intrinsic complexity, partially due to the bureaucratic nature of large organizations, and a very large amount of incidental complexity within the federal government itself.
It's telling that, while I was working in the federal government, I met many people who complained about our healthcare, but not a single one suggested moving any of it into the government - because their personal, first-hand experience with the government's inefficiency and complexity allowed them to understand how extremely bad of an idea that would be.
In theory, it may be more efficient to have the federal government handle healthcare. But in the current state of the government, with the mismanagement and inefficiency and incredible overhead due to internal policies, it will factually not be more efficient for our current government. And trying to push single-payer healthcare on a government that is not ready for it and will result in worse outcomes is just straight-up malicious.
> Every other developed country figured it out, and so can we.
I looked up the most populated countries in the world[1] and the countries with the highest life expectation[2]. None of the top 10 countries in terms of life expectancy were in the top 10 of population - the United States is the 3rd most populous. And out of the top 10 countries ranked by population, the United States had the highest life expectancy of all of them.
The reason for this is because bureaucratic complexity scales superlinearly as the size of the organization, which is a function of the scope of its responsibilities. For a government, that means that complexity is superlinear function of population, scope, and employee count.
The government of United States, with its population of 347 million, is categorically incomparable to the government of Switzerland with its population of 9 million (which is the highest-ranked Western country on that list - Japan, the most populous country in the top 10 of life expectancy, not only has less than half the US at 123 million, but has a wildly different government and culture than any Western country, making it even more incomparable).
So, it's extremely inaccurate, naive, and dishonest to compare the US's healthcare to small European and Asian countries that have longer life expectancy. Our government, in its current state, would make healthcare massively worse, our population (and governmental complexity) is far higher than those nations, and we have the best life expectancy of any of the 10 most populous countries. The system is clearly working adequately, and even if it could be better, nationalizating healthcare or insurance is not the solution, unless and until fixes to the systemic problems in the government are implemented.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by...
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
I thought standard practice was now to never store passwords, then use hashes & salts instead?
And yet there are plenty of shops that will either symmetrically encrypt passwords (at best, the email address or username is used as an IV), Log passwords stupidly [0], have a piss-poor integration where "Oh we have base64 encode the actual XML payload in the soap service and tag it '<Encrypted>`, ship it!" [1], or are just plain too budget strapped to replace the 'forgot password' functionality that told a user their password vs forcing a reset.
And I think that last point hits it well. i.e. at least a plurality of those horrors were done before standard practices evolved to the current state, but nobody can get the budget/time to fix it. (And, I will say, having 'fixed' more than one of the above cases, it definitely has a user impact which can lead to the folks approving the work having an uncomfortable conversation with customers. B: "We forced a password reset to update security standards" C: "Wait so your security standards were subpar!!!" [2]
[0] - Example; logging invalid attempts, but wait a user only failed because they did TypoEmailAddress@gmailcom instead of TypoEmailAddress@gmail.com.
[1] - Yes. This was a thing I got to deal with once. What's even more annoying is that it was a SOAP service so of course the pattern eliminated most of the potential usefulness of a SOAP service.
[2] - That said, usually the person making this complaint, is the person who historically was e-mailing their account rep to give them their password, vs using the 'correct flow but bad implementation' password reset we had in place as a stopgap.
I keep getting notices in the post mail that my or my families medical data was leaked.
How is this not a HIPPA violation?
or begin to encrypt e-mails with S/MIME or GPG. Keep private keys on lockdown and never distribute to web mail clients.
Password breached or brute forced somehow? Great, good luck getting through 2FA that uses OTP. Oh the 2FA used for e-mail account was broken? Now you are in.
Great, now that you are in. All my e-mails are encrypted on server's disk with a mix of S/MIME and GPG. Good luck getting my private keys that I only keep on my local machine and secured behind additional methods of authentication (ie, fingerprint and password authN).
Defense in depth, folks.
So what? Hiding your old email content might be valuable from a privacy point of view but if you cared about that you'd just delete them from the server to begin with.
What a hacker cares about is the ability to receive new emails (password recovery). Those emails are still sent to you in clear text.
He might also care about getting a list of past senders (to know what accounts you might have) and that info isn't encrypted by GPG, only the content.
Seriously? In what possible world can a collection of plain-text login credentials exist for any legitimate purpose?
Although I can anticipate what you'll say...
> Based on his analysis, Fowler determined the data was captured by some kind of infostealer malware. A popular tool used by cybercriminals, an infostealer is designed to grab usernames, passwords, and other sensitive data from breached sites and servers.
That part is just incorrect and doesn't make any sense. Infostealers typically grab the credentials that a victim of a malware has saved in browser password managers.
In this case, the alternate link is informative and worth a look:
https://www.websiteplanet.com/news/infostealer-breach-report...
Cheers.