Most people who get phished aren’t using password managers, or they would notice that the autofill doesn’t work because the domain is wrong.
Additionally, TOTP 2FA (numeric codes) are phishable; stop using them when U2F/WebAuthn/passkeys are available.
I have never been phished because I follow best practices. Most people don’t.
In 15 years of maintaining OSS, I've never been pwned, phished, or anything of the sort.
Thank you for your input :)
Well, until now.
They screwed up, but we have thousands of years of evidence that people make mistakes even when they really know better and the best way to prevent that is to remove places where a single person making a mistake causes a disaster.
On that note, how many of the organizations at risk do you think have contributed a single dollar or developer-hour supporting the projects they trust? Maybe that’s where we should start looking for changes.
But instead, we're left with this mess where ordinary developers are forced to deal with the consequences of getting phished.
Also, Yubikeys work on phones just fine, via both NFC and USB.
Just set up a new passkey on the mobile device.
Password managers can’t help you if you don’t use them properly.
Spotify steals (and presumably uploads) your clipboard, as well as other apps. Autofill is your primary defense against phishing, as you (and hopefully some others) learned this week.
The autofill feature is not 100% reliable for various reasons:
(1) some companies use different domains that are legitimate but don't exactly match the url in the password manager. Troy Hunt, the security expert who runs https://haveibeenpwned.com/ got tricked because he knew autofill is often blank because of legit different domains[1]. His sophisticated knowledge and heuristics of how autofill is implemented -- actually worked against him.
(2) autofill doesn't work because of technical bugs in the plugin, HTML elements detection, interaction/incompatibility with new browser versions, etc. It's a common complaint with all password plugins:
https://www.google.com/search?q=1password+autofill+doesn%27t...
https://www.1password.community/discussions/1password/1passw...
https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20a...
... so in the meantime while the autofill is broken, people have to manually copy-paste the password!
The real-world experience of flaky and glitchy autofill distorts the mental decision tree.
Instead of, "hey, the password manager didn't autofill my username/password?!? What's going on--OH SHIT--I'm being phished!" ... it becomes "it didn't autofill in the password (again) so I assume the Rube-Goldberg contraption of pw manager browser plugin + browser version is broken again."
Consider the irony of how password managers not being perfectly reliable causes sophisticated technical minds to become susceptible to social engineering.
In other words, password managers inadvertently create a "Normalization of Deviance" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
[1] >Thirdly, the thing that should have saved my bacon was the credentials not auto-filling from 1Password, so why didn't I stop there? Because that's not unusual. There are so many services where you've registered on one domain (and that address is stored in 1Password), then you legitimately log on to a different domain. -- from: https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mail...
The number of cases in this thread, about a malware attack basically because of 1Password, where people mention their bad experience with 1Password is really stretching the "no such thing as bad publicity" theory
It is possible to restrict clipboard access when running applications inside Firejail, i.e. Firejail allows you to restrict access to X11 and Wayland sockets, which prevents the sandboxed application from reading or writing to the system clipboard. See: "--x11=none", "--private=...", "--private-tmp", and so forth. You can run a GUI app with isolated clipboard via "firejail --x11=xvfb app".
For Wayland, you should block access to the Wayland socket by adding "--blacklist=/run/user/*/wayland-*".
I do not use autofill on desktop at all. I use it on Android, however.
One side note: most systems make it hard to completely rely on WebAuthn. As long as other options are available, you are likely vulnerable to an attack. It’s often easier than it should be to get a vendor to reset MFA, even for security companies.
It was a generic Phish email you were in every single Corp 101 security course
My main point was simply that the better response isn’t to mock them but to build systems which can’t fail this badly. WebAuthn is great, but you have to go all in if you want to prevent phishing. NPM would also benefit immensely from putting speed bumps and things like code signing requirements in place, but that’s a big usability hit if it’s not carefully implemented.
Ive literally never for a support email or any email from a .help domain.
I'm not mocking them, just trying to understand how so many red flags slipped past.
Domain name No auto-fill Unannounced MFA resets Etc...
My point is that nothing could have saved this person except extreme security measures. There's literally no conclusion here besides:
1. Lock everything down so extremely that it's extremely inconvenient to prevent mistakes 99% of people don't make. (How many npm packages vs the total have been hijacked, less than 1%)
2. This person was always going to be a victim eventually... And that's a hard pill to swallow. For me and the maintainer. Being in network security it's my actual nightmare scenario.
The only lesson to be learned is you need extreme security measures for even the most experienced of internet users. This wasn't your grandma clicking a link, it's a guy who's been around for decades in the online / coding world.
It also makes me suspicious but that's a road I'd rather keep myself
A password manager can’t manage passwords if you don’t configure it and use it.
You forgot to mention that you are both highly skilled and practiced at phishing yourself... don't you think that helps too?
(Microsoft owns GitHub, which owns NPM.)