Important Kickstarter Security Notice
kickstarter.com
kickstarter.com
Best of luck dealing with this incident. You're in great company, unfortunately. :|
Yes, we're hoping to do a post-mortem soon on our engineering blog, so that others can learn from our experience.
What you urgently want is a cultural change on behalf of industry. This guy is part of the change you want. Biting his fingers is not the optimal path to accomplishing your goals, even if it is viscerally satisfying.
I too want urgent cultural change on behalf of industry; I'll settle for regulation though.
This is already the case in the EU with the Data Protection Directive.
..and
"We have since improved our security procedures and systems in numerous ways"
Perhaps when you do the blog post you could elaborate on what simple things (that were implemented in a few days?) were done especially why they didn't exist in the first place? An example being "we didn't do x because we thought y but now know that isn't the case so we are taking z extra precautions".
Also did you have outside security auditors and could they have done a better job? And if not, why not?
I originally intended to convert it to a disclosure generator, but I haven’t had the time.
I hope it can be of some help to you in dealing with this awful situation, and I’m terribly sorry this happened to you.
kickstarter.com/projects/thorium/thorium-core-cloud-desktop/backers
Edit: Changed "plaintext passwords were taken" to "plaintext-equivalent passwords were taken"
I don't really agree with you.
If you store bcrypted stuff, you see $2a${integer exponent}$hash.
If you store SHA1'ed stuff, you see characteristic hashes and can trivially test against known hashes. So on for MD5, etc.
I don't need you to tell me "we store SHA1'ed stuff iterated 35 times with the following salt", but keeping that information secret wouldn't usually help you anyway. A determined attacker will test and iterate until they've figured out your scheme (or, if you're unlucky, they won't need to).
Telling the attacker "we bcrypted everything" doesn't tell them anything they couldn't plainly see on their own.
This strategy is called "security by obscurity", and is seen as a very bad one.
Instead, cryptography aims to provide means to encrypt data in a way that anyone knows //how// it was encrypted, and still doesn't have a clue how to decrypt it -- because they don't have the key, in case of encryption, and because the hash is a "one-way" function, in case of hashing.
Note that the security of a whole system is harder to get right than the security of any one component; keeping it obscure just makes it much less likely that a white hat will notice the flaw and notify you. A simple example of this is the freshman CS majors' perennial idea that combining multiple PRNGs will yield a "more random" algorithm (it typically makes the result easier to predict). There are plenty of cases of a secure algorithm being used to build a system that ends up insecure because of some obscure flaw that nobody noticed initially.
I think that overstates the case. Your engineers don't have to be better, just good enough know what's correct and safe, or do research until they know.
My approach is to just add things that are clearly correct to published and studied systems that are thought to be correct. In this case, we're talking about applying multiple or multiple runs of one way hashing functions; I'd actually do some research before trying the latter, but it strikes me as safe, and the former is by definition safe, right? Whereas it would never even occur to me to combine PRNGs ... or not use a hardware source of entropy to begin with in the first place (they aren't that expensive in the scheme of things).
LinkedIn was not adding any sort of reasonable defense in depth security through obscurity, but foundational gross negligence.
That is not the case. Even just the length makes it pretty clear which hash is in use ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hash_functions ), and even assuming some crazy "security" scheme in use for storing them (hashing and then padding, or some such), someone with the hashes only has to figure out one password to figure out the procedure used. Given the high likelihood of there being "password" or "12345" hashed somewhere in there, that's not so hard.
This applies here too. If it's secure, which good hashing is, releasing the details should have little to no effect on the security of those hashed passwords. It's also trivial to determine what the hashing scheme is in many cases.
This of course leaves aside the fact that, having compromised any significant portion of the app, they are probably ε from source code anyways.
That said, we're being very public with how we hashed them: older Kickstarter passwords used using SHA-1 digested multiple times. More recent passwords are encrypted with bcrypt.
Your new hash mechanism is sha1 then scrypt.
There is no excuse to do otherwise :)
Irreversible in that we think mathematically you can't go back.
Why do you feel that a private company that is communicating with the press and it's users has any obligation to also inform in the same way (the blog post or press release) hackers and security personnel that would like to know the answer to these questions?
Disclosing these things is nice of course but it's not core to kickstarters business in terms of people who use kickstarter (projects or consumers).
Also be aware that in business there are a ton of behind the scenes things I would like to know that would help me. [1] And if your argument is that security information disseminated is helpful to all that's fine and is correct. So that can be disclosed at the companies discretion. But they have no obligation and aren't going to lose business because security people are mad at them or people on hacker news think a certain thing should have happened.
[1] For example more details on the Comcast merger and the back and forth. But Comcast is not in the business serving it's customer base by giving me info that is helpful to me.
I'd appreciate a description of the hashing algorithm being added to the blog post, but that's less important.
If you say "encrypted", I read that as "somewhere we have a key that gives the attacker plaintext passwords, they might have that key as well".
For example: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/zvm/v5r4/index.jsp?...
If a customer were to be curious as to what hashing is then that link should clear it up perfectly.
In business the "simplicity abstraction layer" [1] on a product is essentially taking something that was created by hackers for hackers (or engineers) and making it simple for end users "the layperson".
God knows anytime you can make something easy for a layperson and not make them think there is money to be made. They aren't interested in your Liebert fire protection system and diverse path routing.
It never fails to amaze me how highly technical types simply can't think out of that box. And yet they make fun of "sales types" that can actually speak and sell to end users an inferior product.
[1] I actually just made that up.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6832445/how-can-bcrypt-h...
If it was 6 (or more) months ago, then I think you'll find at least some sympathy here - "break things" sometimes happens after "move fast," and I'm sure we've all put some code in production that, in retrospect, we wish we hadn't. However, your statement is still technically correct if the switch to bcrypt happened late this week (ie, after the breach was made known to Kickstarter), and that worries me.
My guess is that it was a CPU cost decision but I'm curious anyway.
The purpose of a salt is to defeat rainbow tables (either global, as in unsalted MD5, or site-specific in the case of a fixed salt for a whole site); nothing more.
Any chance you could give us information on what kind of attack vector was used?
Fundamentally, this isn't a high-risk situation. If the password controlled something vital, then sure, force the reset on everyone. But what's the worst someone can do with my Kickstarter credentials? They certainly can't spend any of my money, that requires my Amazon password as well.
Isn't that the information that resulted in Amazon and Apple accounts being compromised last year? Perhaps those two have fixed their procedures to prevent that from happening again, but other companies may not have been pro-active. And even if proper procedures are in place, all it takes is one little screw-up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2
I logged in (old password), hit change password (old password), then had LastPass generate a new password, which it handily saved over the old one in LastPass. Hit Save. And then the site asked me for the old password a third time.
Whoops! I don't have that anymore...
Note to Kickstarter: It is not good UX to ask for the new password, and then the old password. But that's likely the least of their worries right now.
That is at least debatable. It might be a good idea to warn users that this will happen, if it's not immediately obvious from the form layout, but reauthenticating at the end of a lengthy or multi-step process is often a sensible precaution. Every system I use where security really matters (transferring significant amounts of money to another party from my bank account, filing statutory tax returns, etc.) does this.
(This isn't to say that a process for resetting a password that required the old one three different times would be sensible. But I don't accept your general-looking claim that it's bad UX to ask for the old password after the new one.)
But in this case (or any password change case, really), it is not a "lengthy or multi-step process" and putting the old password at the end has surprised a number of people in a bad way.
Not just here, I've seen the exact same thing mentioned on twitter. See https://twitter.com/blowdart , "Wow, the kickstarter change password process is AWFUL. Prompt for existing password after? Screws up lastpass flow" - it has multiple retweets and "me too" replies.
I would have no problem with entering my password at the end of a lengthy high-value transaction, so long as that transaction hasn't also changed my password to something else earlier. Which it shouldn't.
A rule of thumb is that if a lot of people find the process is broken then the UX is probably bad, and needs a redesign.
That is true, though in this particular case it's not clear whether it really is "a lot" of people or more a vocal but possibly small group who are also using another specific tool, which might itself be the problem because it isn't flexible enough to do the job here. It sounds like you have a password generation/management tool where it is easy to delete a valuable password before you're done with it and with no way to get it back, which I would argue is probably a much more serious usability problem!
Ideally the change password process would be made clear for everyone and avoid the problem entirely, of course, and if we're just talking about a simple old/new password form (I haven't seen it) then surely that should be possible here. I'm not defending the status quo (again, I haven't seen it). I'm just saying I don't think this issue is quite as simple as you previously suggested, and possibly Kickstarter aren't the only ones with room for improvement here.
This has now been mentioned as a problem in 4 different tools: LastPass, KeePass, iCloud password manager and RoboForm.
While it is sadly still true that people who use password managers are a small minority, they are among the most security-conscious and technically literate users.
> It sounds like you have a password generation/management tool where it is easy to delete a valuable password before you're done with it
You could look at it that way. But I think that would be myopic. It's IMHO closer to the truth that this website is perverse about when you are done with the old password. And no other website that I have come across shares this defect.
> if we're just talking about a simple old/new password form (I haven't seen it)
Wow. So much invested in evaluated something you haven't experienced, but could easily.
It's really too bad that they are recommending expensive, proprietary, commercial apps for this when free, open source alternatives like KeePass exist. If users are unconvinced on the value of a password vault, charging money for it certainly isn't going to encourage adoption.
The websites allow for a vulnerability in third party code to expose you. Keepass, even if it has a vulnerability, can't be exploited remotely since the database is stored only locally.
The websites are in the browser and encourage browser extensions. Browsers suck for security... that's a massive attack surface and they are, by their nature, integrated with the network. Keepass is a dedicated application with a tiny surface that barely communicates with the internet at all and has no need to. A whole class of attacks miss it.
Keepass is leaps and bounds more secure.
Of course that implies the attacker knows you used KeePass, security through obscurity and being in the minority should protect you.
The idea is that even if your password for kickstarter gets compromised, since you are using a password manager that password should only ever be used in kickstarter, so you can just change your password there and carry on
In case
1) If you mean could they crack your keypass file where you keep all your passwords:
Presuming you're using the program well, that's possible but very unlikely. There are reasons to believe this would be more difficult than attacking any of your normal passwords individually though:
- The database for your passwords is not stored on a server they're likely to have been compromised, (it's a local file on your machine unless you place it somewhere else or your machine itself is compromised.)
- By having only one database, you can use an approach like a long diceware pass phrase. Which would allow you to generate a password for the database that's likely to be far harder to guess than any individual password that you might otherwise have used for the sites in the database.
- It's plausible to direct more processing towards making dictionary and guessing attacks against your database's password harder than a server would be likely to direct towards each individual user's password.
In case
2) If you mean could they crack the password for the website that you keep in the keypass file, by attacking the hash that they got from the server attack:
Theoretically, yes. However, again, there are several qualities in favour of the keepass approach:
- Generation is automated. People are usually bad at generating hard to guess passwords. We think that we're making something hard to guess by inserting letters and numbers into a few words and then going 'presto!' but in reality we tend to follow fairly common patterns in what words we pick, what letters we replace, and so on. We also tend to duplicate them across sites.
- Remembering and entry are automated. (We tend to be bad at remembering things that don't follow common patterns.) Thus making these generated passwords more practical to use.
Those two factors combined address the main weaknesses of passwords. It's not something innate about the database that does this, mind. You could do much the same yourself if you had a perfect memory, or a notebook, and were willing to sit there throwing dice to get a good entropy source. However, I've yet to meet a human who remembers a significant number of dice-generated pass-phrases for all their accounts, and writing your passwords down represents its own potential problems (loss, compromise, speed of entry when reading the things.) The way to bet is that this is going to give you a harder to attack password than you'd come up with by yourself.
They also reduce the impact of a compromise. If a password for a site is compromised, then that compromise is limited to that website, and relatively easily rectified as compared to a more general breach if you reused your passwords.
For instance, my hacker news password until shortly before this post was:
4ea3a70a8361ab5d2006fbe0f98b52f2bcc6512a866e9ddaf2e9ea951d01dbed
But that's worthless information now. I told my password prog to generate another string, and now it's something else. Took less than a minute.
#
Of course, if your keepass vault itself is compromised, then you may be dealing with a worse situation. However, considering the general weakness of passwords, and the degree to which they get duplicated, and the additional security features around things like banks that protect some of the more vital stuff, I'm not sure that even putting all your eggs in one really well guarded basket makes you significantly more vulnerable if it is broken into.
But regardless, the cost of attacking an individual user goes up dramatically, whereas the rewards don't seem to scale in line with that. If someone thinks you're interesting enough to attempt to compromise your computer, get the database, and then invest resources in guessing your database password... you've probably got more serious problems anyway.
Also they run in your browser which mean the client side and crypto code is easily recoverable
Tell us more? Should I switch from LastPass?
If users aren't convinced of the value of a password vault, a god-awful piece of software certainly isn't going to encourage adoption even if it's "free"
"free" if your time is worth nothing
KeePass is perfectly usable if you spend 5 minutes figuring it out. It's also open source and thus analyzable for flaws, leaving one fewer vulnerability (proprietary code) for those who actually care about security.
What's really worrying is that the Kickstarter folk didn't detect the breach themselves. It was law enforcement (I'm assuming FBI) who contacted them about it.
On the security notice, Kickstarter writes they "set a very high bar" on how they serve their community. What a load of crock!. If they had a high bar this would never have happened. I wish they wouldn't rub salt in the wound by publishing such blatant rubbish.
I'm extremely disappointed with Kickstarter right now.
On the one hand, that's a gutsy and convenient UI.
However, I immediately chose to delete my account.
Ironically there is at least a clearly defined system and procedure setup to mitigate a stolen credit card number. Essentially most if not all credit card companies will wipe out any malicious charges and cheerfully replace your credit card. And hopefully if you have more than one card that's not even a problem that you have to wait.
All the other information though that is:
"some information about our customers was. Accessed information included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords"
...well to me that's actually more of an issue. Ironically.
1) only available until the tokes were revoked
2) if enabled, attacker must also obtain the 'app secret' and sign requests
3) if enabled, attacker must use the tokens from a white-listed IP address
The post only makes reference to encrypted passwords. Not sure if Facebook access tokens are included in that or not.
On Wednesday night, law enforcement officials contacted Kickstarter and alerted us that hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of our customers' data. Upon learning this, we immediately closed the security breach and began strengthening security measures throughout the Kickstarter system.
No credit card data of any kind was accessed by hackers. There is no evidence of unauthorized activity of any kind on your account.
While no credit card data was accessed, some information about our customers was. Accessed information included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. Actual passwords were not revealed, however it is possible for a malicious person with enough computing power to guess and crack an encrypted password, particularly a weak or obvious one.
As a precaution, we strongly recommend that you change the password of your Kickstarter account, and other accounts where you use this password.
To change your password, log in to your account at Kickstarter.com and look for the banner at the top of the page to create a new, secure password. We recommend you do the same on other sites where you use this password. For additional help with password security, we recommend tools like 1Password and LastPass.
We’re incredibly sorry that this happened. We set a very high bar for how we serve our community, and this incident is frustrating and upsetting. We have since improved our security procedures and systems in numerous ways, and we will continue to do so in the weeks and months to come. We are working closely with law enforcement, and we are doing everything in our power to prevent this from happening again.
Kickstarter is a vibrant community like no other, and we can’t thank you enough for being a part of it. Please let us know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. You can reach us at accountsecurity@kickstarter.com.
Thank you,
Yancey Strickler Kickstarter CEO
2. Given the wording - "access to some of our customers' data" - will you provide a way to check if specific account was affected? Or was it "possibly all customer data"?
Thanks
More seriously, why is the social convention to lie in these situations? Why not just say what methods they were actually using?
I suppose it's possible they were storing encrypted passwords. But then an attacker would be able to break all of them at once.
Except that we already do know ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7245439 ) . This notice to the general public is not the sum total of their communications. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7245598 )
I humbly suggest all security notices like this that are sent in the future, if written with the word "encryption" rather than "hashing" for the layperson's sake, have an asterisk next to the word "encryption". At the bottom of the email, the explanation "hashing with {{algo}}" where "hashing" links to [1] would be included. Laypeople get their simple explanation, technical people don't get too angry. And some laypeople may click through the link and learn something.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function#Pas...
It is indeed troubling that KS didn't detect the breach in the first place (or if they did, they kept it mum until forced by the authorities).
If they did contact kickstarter but got nowhere and were forced to contact the authorities, then that says something else.
EDIT: I did just talk to someone who is not a campaign owner and received an email regarding this, so it does look like they're in flight.
Please don't make such recommendation. This won't change the fact that password is stored in your database. In a security breach, don't ever make such recommendation.
In fact, the alert doesn't tell me exactly what happened. Are just two accounts stolen from phishing attack? Or was it a server breached? We need that detail.
For disclosure, please do the following:
1. time of incident reported and the time of impact.
2. how the incident was reported
3. the severity of the incident
4. how the incident happened
5. resolution
I don't mind having a first notice and then follow up by a more detailed post, but don't forget...
We'd all like answers to every question we could have about the compromise. As you can see upthread, they've already committed to providing some of those answers. In the meantime, they're probably slammed with other things, and you aren't actually entitled to answers to all of your questions. You are obviously free to take your business elsewhere if their answers aren't satisfactory.
To be fair, GP did say he didn't mind if they delayed answers until they've remediated the issue.
>you aren't actually entitled to answers to all of your questions. You are obviously free to take your business elsewhere if their answers aren't satisfactory.
I would agree, generally. But this is an issue wherein the company has failed the trust that was previously placed in them by the customer. The customer already made the decision to give the company his business and so could incur harm, even if he subsequently chooses to take his future business elsewhere.
So, I believe customers are certainly "entitled to answers". Judging from the way Kickstarter is handling this, it appears that they agree.
Seriously? You think this is going to materially impact kickstarter? [1] That all of the sudden people will stop having projects and people will stop funding projects. That this is like the Corvair and "unsafe at any speed" or Audi unintended acceleration? To things like this a typical end will think "happens to everyone yawn what's for dinner".
[1] If anything the publicity of the break will help kickstarter if it gets any national media attention (I don't think it will but other security breaches have). Things like this are usually bad for well known brick and mortar companies (say Target) but not the same for a company at the lower level of brand awareness of Kickstarter. Very familiar to all of us on HN but in terms of the general public in fly over country not that well known. Remembering early stories of nasty stuff on ebay and craiglists that got mentioned that only helped them.
No, I don't. That's not what I said.
We don't yet know what is going on and recommending password manager makes no sense until we know the actual problem. And deferring security breach to an external tool is not a recommendation anyone should make.
So having a password manager would solve a SQLi? It might be the case that this is just some stolen account from phishing attack. But do we know? We don't. So now using LastPass makes the user more confident about his or her password security inside KickStarter? How can anyone be happy with that conclusion?
Secondly, password managers don't make your password more secured. Maybe I should rephrase: don't even consider any online password manager. Storing multiple passwords in a single database that someone else owns? I don't see how that's going to make me feel better about password security. If anything, decentralized means we don't give a single person all the identity. Now we do. We tell LastPass here are the list of passwords I use. Great. I probably will be slightly happier with an offline password manager, but in the end, your brain can function and scale better than a service.
Sorry, fundamentally and practically I will have to disagree with you. And I stand by my own view and there is nothing wrong with my view and any downvote just seems ridiculous. In fact, I think people should think deeply before utilizing ANY password manager. If you have a security breach, focus on disclosure and tell people what went wrong because that's the only thing can tell people how to do better with their account.
1Password does have some sync functionality between devices, using third-party services (dropbox, iCloud) and LAN-local using wifi. Or you could otherwise copy your own encrypted password database between machines.
People should use different passwords for different sites anyway but we both know they don't and most people wouldn't be able to handle that.
Aaaannnnddddd I'm guessing they lost the salt >.<
[+] Or whatever the cryptograhpers call it :)
But you're spot on with the unique password, I make very sure to use one for every site that has anything to do with money.
* Changing it is pretty much trivial: generate new password, plug in site, save
* I may have set it before KS started using bcrypt, and I'd rather not have third parties log in my KS account, even if (as far as I can see) there's nothing they can do with it
If my security is an afterthought to you, then you don't deserve my business.
Handling Other People's Money is the essential part of their business.
They didn't detect the intrusion.
The last one tends to concern me in these sorts of incidents.
In any case: if you're setting the bar for "handling transactions online" at "must be the first to detect any compromise", you're probably good with using Amazon and... hm, probably nobody else.
And, you know, outside of computer stuff where I send my money to NewEgg, I do by default prefer Amazon to all others.
(NewEgg has good prices, superb shipping of bare hard drives, the very best and informative reviews, and now a question and answer system, which sends email to people who've bought a product in case they can answer them. Or so I've found with a fan I recently bought, and helped two people, in one case whipping out my micrometer.)
For what it's worth: we don't generally recommend IDS deployments.
(That is not asked out of idle curiosity, and I've been told the worst intrusions hack the kernel so tripwire would likely be useless, but don't know if those are widespread.)
Tripwire is not a total waste of time, like a network IDS would be, but for most startups a minute spent setting up Tripwire is a minute that could be better spent on appsec.
Also with proper hardening you can prevent the kernel from being modified even by root. Things like FreeBSD securelevel that once enabled blocks writing to kernel memory and raw disk devices.
File integrity is also a pain in the ass. You have to keep a database of good file hashes and it can't be stored on the server (or the attacker modifies the known good hashes). Generally you also should not even have the file integrity software on the live server filesystem.
Similarly Network IDS has the flaw that you must have well defined profiles of "normal behavior" so it can identify abnormal behavior. The other option is signature-based but that would only detect known exploits.
Plus, I'm not sure where you possibly got billions in annual revenue? They're incredibly public about their statistics and business model. They take 5% of successfully raised projects. They report $842M successful dollars on the site, for a lifetime revenue of $42 million in the 5 years since they were founded.
I was trying to go 60 days without posting on HN. I't been 42 days. This is important enough to break my silence and at least make a request.
Kickstarter: You deal with personal and financial data. Could you please enable two things for those of us who understand security issues and want better security:
1- Give me the option to not use my email as the login user id.
I've warmed-up to the idea of using randomized user names on sites that allow it. Something like "aoc4sour*!Z". On such sites I have completely different and randomly generated user id's and passwords. Pretty much impossible for an intruder to associate those accounts with any other accounts.
...unless...
They can access personal information such as real name, email, mailing address, phone and other personal identifying data that could contribute towards social engineering into other sites.
hence...
2- Please enable an option to choose two factor authentication.
This should be there as a firewall to access any personal data at all, even email and real name. It should also be required for any financial transaction, including pledging any amount on a project.
I'd say make it optional because the less informed (or less paranoid) might not want to bother.
finally...
3- I love questions such as "What's the name of your first pet?". How about some of those?
I am being a bit sarcastic here. When answered honestly these questions are really dangerous. It doesn't take a lot of social engineering to figure out most of them when armed with enough personal data.
However, I like to answer such questions with a random set of words. So, the name of my first pet might be "blue ladder tent aquifer". In other words, pretty much impossible to guess even if I gave you access to my facebook and linkedin accounts.
When used in this fashion these questions, I think, are actually useful. I'd venture to guess that most people don't do it this way because they don't understand the implications of providing straight answers.
These kinds of breaches have been accelerating. At least that's the feeling I'm getting. This to the point that I had a sit-down security meeting at home to make sure everyone at home understands what's going on and the fact that we need to make sure we use different passwords for every site and service and even different user names where possible. Pain in the ass but far less so than having your life turned upside-down by one of these idiots.
Any thoughts, comments or improvements on the above will be highly appreciated.
BACK TO LURKING:
In the meantime, I am going to see about going back into mostly lurking mode on HN. I found it quite revealing to take a real break from reading and posting on HN. For the last 42 days I've checked HN's first page nearly daily and only scan a few threads very quickly, dismiss most of them and refrain from posting comments (until this one).
ON ANOTHER TOPIC: HELL-BANNED?
I wanted to initiate a thread to share my observations and reflections after, well, now 42 days of just glancing at HN and not posting. However, either I am the subject of a strange hellban or something is broken. I can post comments all I want but I don't seem to be able to start new threads. Not sure how to fix it. Too bad.
For #1, the answer is to own your own domain and use an email service that allows anything@your-domain.com. I use Fastmail, and my Kickstarter account had its own "anything" ... although I hadn't thought of randomizing (a portion of) it. Good idea!
2: Two factor only helps the sites that use it. A less careful user might use the same password at every site, including those that require a 2nd factor.
3: Yep, that can be an issue. I've found as of late many sites offer enough questions that social engineering would utterly fail. And see #2, this doesn't address other sites.
The first trick is to not let your site get compromised, and for any data gained to be of little use. Any site like Kickstarter that handles Other People's Money (e.g. credit cards in the U.K.) should be very, very paranoid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7245666
Join the club.
I got too involved in a number of threads involving politics. I probably went counter to the ideology supported by those moderating HN and eventually got chopped-off at the knees.
I say "rightly so" because after taking a 42 day break from HN I look back at this community with different eyes. It should be about tech and startups with as little extraneous stuff as possible. That's where HN delivers value.
Taking several steps back and looking at what I've seen over the last 42 days it is obvious that most discussions that stray far away from tech are pretty much pointless whining from one side or the other of the argument. Most of these are a total waste of time. In a lot of cases they blow out of proportion because the average HN poster/reader is younger and lacking enough real-world experience. So you have worlds colliding with nothing of any measurable use being produced.
Even with technical discussions there's a lot of wasted typing on HN. Everyone is responsible of this to one extent or another. I am not excluding myself from any of these characterizations. Over the last 42 days I've clicked through threads and, more often than not, I tend to dismiss them as "typical difficult programmer nit-picking" which is what I typically see when discussions between programmers turn into endlessly going back and forth on fundamentally insignificant details. Programmers are some of the most difficult people to argue with. It must be the automatic "if-then-else" and "switch" statements that you develop over the years.
Anyhow, it sucks to be able to comment but not initiate threads. On the other hand, it's also a nice way to limit the time one devotes to such things. Would I like to have my thread starter privileges restored? Of course. Am I going to get into political or minutiae discussions? Nope. Waste of time, for all involved.
Thanks for the extensive comment, apologies for not responding earlier (on assignment).