Use the “passwords” feature to check if one of yours is compromised. If it shows up, never ever reuse those credentials. They’ll be baked into thousands of botnets etc. and be forevermore part of automated break-in attempts until one randomly succeeds.
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Protip for the room: Use a password manager with a unique password for every service. Then when one leaks, it only affects that singular service, not large swaths of your digital life.
Also 2FA. You’ll still want to change passwords but it buys you time.
Also, length is most of what matters. A full length sentence in lowercase with easy to type finger/key flow for pw manager master, and don’t know a single other password. Can someone correct me if I’m wrong?
I’ve found that there are a handful of passwords that you need to remember, the rest can go in the password manager. This includes the password for the password manager, of course, but also passwords for your computer/phone (since you need to log in before you can access the password manager), and your email (to be able to recover your password for the password manager).
You are also correct that length is mostly what matters, but also throwing in a random capitalization, a number or two, and some special character will greatly increase the required search space. Also using uncommon words, or words in other languages than english can also greatly increase the resistance to dictionary attacks.
your email (to be able to recover your password for the password manager)
If your password manager has a password recovery mechanism, that means your key is stored on the server and would be compromised in a breach. If that’s the case, I highly recommend changing password managers.
The ideal way a password manager works is by having all encryption done client-side and never sending the password to the server. If the server cannot decrypt your password data, neither can an attacker. That’s how my password manager works (Bitwarden), and I highly recommend restricting your options only to password managers with that property.
If you need a backup, write it in a notebook and keep it in a safe. If your house gets broken into, change your password immediately before the thief has a chance to rifle through the stuff they stole. My SO and I have shared passwords to all important credentials, so that’s out backup mechanism.
throwing in a special character
Okay, but hackers don’t have to know whether I used special character or just lowercase? Or am I stoopid?
You are mostly correct it is length * (possible char values).
See passphrase generator.
https://www.keepersecurity.com/features/passphrase-generator
Correct horse battery staple
As always, the most secure password is the least convenient and accessible. It’s a trade off, but you want fewer dictionary words and patterns overall. Preferably with a physical component for the master password.
Longer is better…giggitty.
I was thinking about this earlier. The password manager browser plugin I use (Proton Pass) defaults to staying unlocked for the entire browser session. If someone physically gained access to my PC while my password manager was unlocked, they’d be able to access absolutely every password I have. I changed the behavior to auto-lock and ask for a 6-digit PIN, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t take an impractical amount of time to brute-force a 6-digit PIN.
Before I started use a password manager, I’d use maybe 3-4 passwords for different “risks,” (bank, email, shopping, stupid shit that made me sign up, etc). Not really sure if a password manager is better (guess it depends on the “threat” you’re worried about).
Edit: Also on my phone, it just unlocks with a fingerprint, and I think law enforcement are allowed to force you to biometrically unlock stuff (or can unlock with fingerprints they have on file).
Yes, it is better. The likelihood that someone will physically access your device is incredibly low, the likelihood that one of the services in your bucket gets leaked and jeopardizes your other accounts is way higher.
I set mine to require my password after a period of time on certain devices (the ones I’m likely to lose), and all of them require it when restarting the browser.
it just unlocks with a fingerprint, and I think law enforcement are allowed to force you to biometrically unlock stuff
True, but it’s also highly unlikely that LE will steal your passwords.
My phone requires a PIN after X hours or after a few failed fingerprint attempts, and it’s easy to fail without being sus. In my country, I cannot be forced to reveal a PIN. If I travel to a sketchy country or something, i switch it to a password unlock.
I use a “password pattern”, rather than remembering all the passwords, I just remember a rule I have for how passwords are done, there are some numbers and letters that change depending on what the service is so every password is unique and I can easily remember all of them as long as I remember the rules I put in place
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And when that password manager gets cracked?
Got any examples? Because I have…some…examples of password reuse being a real-life problem.
LastPass recently, check Addie Lamarr’s channel on YouTube.
LastPass is the maximum shit. They got hacked like 3 times in a year and my company‘s password notes got leaked.
We are now with Bitwarden and this was the biggest security hardening measure we have taken.
Make sure whatever password manager you use doesn’t store the key on their servers. Bitwarden does this correctly (if you lose your PW, Bitwarden can’t recover it), and I’m sure some competitors do as well. LastPass apparently didn’t.
Yeah, I left LastPass after like 15 years when I’ve come across some news headlines that it had got breaches more than once while I was using it O.o
Been a happy user of Bitwarden for a couple years now. I love that little “copy custom field name” function, so I don’t have to go hunting around in the HTML code if a site is using weird field names.
Yes and no; they have their own issues:
https://cybersecuritynews.com/hackers-weaponize-keepass-password-manager/
I assure you, the rare security issues for password managers are far preferable to managing compromises every couple weeks.
I’ve only really been in one breach. This one is actually a breach of a “security firm” (incompetent idiots) who aggregated login data from the dark web themselves, essentially doing the blackhats’ work for them.
This is also EXACTLY why requiring online interactions to be verified with government ID is a terrible idea. Hackers will similarly be able to gain all possible wanted data in a single location. It’s simply too tempting of a target not to shoot for.
I currently have 110 unique user+password combos. I wouldn’t want to change all those even once, if I were breached and had used similar credentials everywhere.
Bitwarden keeps them well managed, synced between devices, and allows me to check the whole database for matches/breaches via haveibeenpwned integration. Plus because I prefer to keep things in-house as much as possible, I even self-host the server with vaultwarden walled off behind my own vpn, instead of using the public servers. (this also means it’s free, instead of a paid service)
You’ve only been in one breach that you know about so far!
If you think you’ve only been in one breach, you’re probably mistaken or very young. I don’t know how many breaches I’ve been involved in, but it’s at least double digits.
I’m American, and my Social Security number has been leaked multiple times. Each time I’ve done everything possible to secure my accounts (random passwords, TOTP 2FA where possible, randomized usernames, etc), yet there’s always a new breach that impacts me.
I’m not too worried though. My important accounts are pretty secure. I use one of the few banks (brokerage actually) that provides proper 2FA. My email and password manager use 2FA. My credit is frozen. Breaches happen, the important thing is to limit the impact of a breach.
Don’t download shit from random websites… make sure its from legit places…
legit places…
My university, 23andMe, Transunion, Equifax, CapitalOne, United Healthcare…
You shouldn’t download KeePass from any of those.
Legit means the keepass website… those are not legit places to download the password manager
Yeah UHC sold my data as soon as I was put under their coverage. Now I get so many phishing emails pretending to be from UHC.
These kinds of breaches are at the site level. Not much you can do as a regular user if the company doesn’t hash or salt their passwords, for example.
I believe they are replying to the article you posted in regards to the download from legit sites comment, not the fact that the sites have shit web practices (which while correct is a different thing).
To the people who didn’t read the article posted in the comment prior, basically the software installed wasn’t the legitimate software, it was a modified software that was a trojan that was forwarding passwords stored in the keepass database to a home server.
That’s not something that the sites are going wrong, nor is it the password managers fault. That’s fully the users fault for downloading a trojan.
Not from what the article says
involves compromised download links and trojanized versions of the legitimate KeePass application that appear identical to the authentic software on the surface, while harboring dangerous capabilities beneath.
Oh, so don’t use unique passwords? Sure buddy.
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A password manager is still a good idea, but you have to not use a hacked one. So only download from official sites and repositories. Run everything you download through VirusTotal and your machine’s antivirus if you have one. If it’s a Windows installer check it is properly signed (Windows should warn you if not). Otherwise (or in addition) check installer signatures with GPG. If there’s no signature, check the SHA256 OR SHA512 hash against the one published on the official site. Never follow a link in an email, but always go directly to the official website instead. Be especially careful with these precautions when downloading something critical like a password manager.
Doing these things will at least reduce your risk of installing compromised software.
The company I work for forces everyone to do a training every year that goes over all of that and a few others. I assume most larger companies do the same.
None of this has anything to do with password managers, but knowing how to install stuff properly.
Stuffing? Just in time for the holiday season!
moans “stuff me santa”
Santa: “we are skipping that house”
As someone who consults in the IT Security space, It’s bad out there. Contractors and BYOD companies are downright sheepish in asking their outsourced employees to do anything security-related to their devices. The biggest attack vector is allowed unfettered remote access (and therefore the whole company and any bad actors are also granted unfettered remote access)
I still can’t get over how quickly companies-at-large have abandoned VPN Servers (removing network trust from the list of options as well)
I’m down to managed browsers via IdP, and I just can’t wait for the objections to that as well. People out here offering their faces to leopards. Certificate-based MFA on all the things IMO - passwords shouldnt matter (but six digit MFA codes aren’t immune to fake landing pages and siphoned MFA tokens that don’t expire)
I use utterly unique and very long passphrases for the most important stuff (banking, mortgage servicing, email, etc.), 2FA for those and most other things, and just throwaway crap passwords for things I don’t care about (web forums and most everything else).
Let’s make a master list of all the emails leaked with their passwords, what could go wrong?
That’s not how it works
It’s exactly how it worked. A company called synthient made a master list with all the leaked emails + all leaked passwords. Then they were hacked and it leaked
Synthient wasn’t hacked, as a security company, they aggregated tons of stealer logs dumped to social media, Telegram, etc.
They found 8% of the data collected was not in the HIBP database, confirmed with some of the legitimate owners that the data was real.
They then took that research and shared it with HIBP which is the correct thing to do.
I was also thrown off by the title they gave it when I first saw it, a security company being hacked would be a terrible look. but they explain it in the article. Should probably have named it “list aggregation” or something.
so why hibp calls them data breach??? Ultra misleading, almost defamation, everyone including me only reads the headlines
But then nothing has changed if they were just collating what was already leaked.
God fucking dammit, I fucking hate seeing people self-censor themselves on the internet.
The thing about this one is no one seems sure of the source (it appears to be from multiple sources, including infostealer malware and phishing attacks), so you don’t know which passwords to change. To be safe you’d have to do all of them.
Some password managers (e.g. Bitwarden) offer an automatic check for whether your actual passwords have been seen in these hack databases, which is a bit more practical than changing hundreds of passwords just in case.
And of course don’t reuse passwords. If you have access to an email masking service you can not only use a different password for every site, but also a different email address. Then hackers can’t even easily connect that it’s your account on different sites.
How do they do that without sending your actual passwords somewhere off your device, or downloading the full list of hacked passwords?
More details about the k-anonimity process. https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords-with-k-anonymity/
The short answer is that they download a partial list of passwords that hash to values starting with the same 5 characters as yours and then check if your password hash is in that list locally. This gives the server very little information about your password if it was not breached and more if it was (but then you should change it anyway), making an elegant compromise
They probably hash the list of hacked passwords the same way your passwords get hashed and check for matches.
Interesting, thanks!
This is why my password is hunter2, no one can see what is says under the asterix,
(it’s asterisk)
for anyone who doesn’t get the reference, it’s an ancient Bash chatlog: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hunter2
Proud that my only pwned password is three decades old.
Yeah gotta make sure you never use the same password in multiple places, use a password manager.
Comprised of email addresses and passwords from previous data breaches,
So these are previously “hacked” data, and now the aggregator has been hacked?
Possibly related question. Layely I’ve been getting email ‘replies’ from various businesses and services (all over the country, USA) all about an ‘inquiry’ that I never made. Apparently someone just got my email address and is using that for – what ? A couple questions:
** What is that someone up to, why doing that?
** Should I do something about that?
** What could I do? Don’t want to change email address.
Probably unrelated, domain spoofing is common, but miss-configured mail servers will accept those emails and process auto replies. They can also abuse input forms to try and send out emails, but that typically does not have much control over content.
If you are getting more emails than you can deal with, than can be used to try and mask other emails by burying them in a large email volume. In that case you should be looking for emails from important accounts you do own (eg banking.)
That’s just your email address being sold by information brokers. Not illegal, not a reason to change your email address. Block, delete & move on.
Apparently my email was included in this breach, but none of the passwords I used with it were (before I started using randomly generated ones).
Are we supposed to pronounce the two "data"s differently when reading aloud? Asking for a friend…
One is like data from Ten Forward.
The first one is like Mister, the second one is like “that, uh…”
I got this email a few days ago. I don’t even know who these people are and why they have my details. But I’ve had to change my Google account passwords anyway.
Is there any info regarding how old this data is?
