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MtGox account database leaked
- drivebyacct2 15y agoWell, I just spent two hours talking to the people interviewing developers at mt.gox and tradehill. Tradehill: SHA-1 currently, looking at SHA-512. No one certified on security. Top creds repeatedly touted was one guy that developed "300 iPhone apps". Mt.Gox: Was NOT hacked. There financial auditor had read-only access to the database and his computer was compromised. They were asked why the financial auditor had access to the data, with no response. I was literally yelling about bcrypt, and apparently Mark (mt.gox) said that bcrypt wasn't actually very secure and that they're were going to use (1000 passes) of SHA-512.
- saalweachter 15y agoPeople are always the weak link. You can't just secure the servers; you've got to secure the entire set of machines which ever connect to the servers, and all of the machines which ever touch the offline data. If your data is stolen off of a laptop or USB drive -- as an absurd amount of data has been -- it's just as stolen as if it's taken from the central server.
- rooshdi 15y agoThe culprit may have posted to HN just hours ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2671766 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2671766
- mikle 15y agoPasswords seem to be hashed. I think this is to be expected since this is such a techy thing (currency?), but still nice to know. Now whether they are hashed and whether the algorithm used is safe are a different story.
- foxhill 15y agoit would appear to be salted md5.
- nbpoole 15y agoYes, although some of them (especially for older accounts, which probably haven't been logged into in a while) appear to be unsalted MD5. That's not unusual: it probably means that MtGox used unsalted MD5 at some point in the past and was upgrading people's passwords in-place after a successful login. It's worth noting that crypt-ed MD5 (which appears to be what's in use here) is fairly weak on modern hardware when compared to an alternative like BCrypt. There's some basic information available on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Crypt_%28Unix%29&oldid=434443071#MD5-based_scheme http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Crypt_%28Unix%29&#...
- arethuza 15y agoIf all you can see is the MD5 hash value, how can you tell that it was unsalted?
- nbpoole 15y agoThe crypt'ed MD5 hashes have a special prefix which indicates that's what they are. For the other hashes, the fact that there's no nonce or other value stored alongside them was a strong hint (although it doesn't rule out a site-wide nonce). However, I confirmed my suspicion by Googling one of the hashes: it was on a list of unsalted hashes that had been brute forced (unrelated to this, the password was fairly common).
- catch23 15y agoAccording to: http://php.net/manual/en/function.crypt.php http://php.net/manual/en/function.crypt.php CRYPT_MD5 - MD5 hashing with a twelve character salt starting with $1$ So the hashes you see beginning with $1$ are probably salted.
- dekz 15y ago
- judofyr 15y agoThere are 1766 hashes that are 32 characters in base-16 (probably MD5, possibly with a site-wide salt) and 59245 hashes that are 34 characters in base-66 (appears to be an MD5-based crypt(3) hash). EDIT: Ops, I missed some hashes.
- nbpoole 15y agoThe list I've seen has over 60k entries.
- xfs 15y agoThere are duplicate hashes. Taking out the dups, there are 1610 md5 hashes. And 34% of these are crackable with a rainbow table. This means they are unsalted.
- DrJ 15y agoat least now I finally get to use that 10GB rainbow table I downloaded a while back.
- eis 15y agoThere are UNSALTED md5 hashes in there.
- judofyr 15y agoEhm, how we you know that? Maybe the salts were stored another place? Or simply the attacker didn't release them? Or maybe MtGox used a site-wide salt that's stored in their codebase somewhere? EDIT: Okay, they appear to be unsalted (according to nbpoole): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2671714 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2671714
- jjm 15y agoI have to admit that when you have real money behind a hobby[1] project of this size and amount you might want to hire some security professionals to do an audit of your system. It goes for all the exchanges. Heck, I hope brick and mortar banks do a 'real' audit while I'm on the subject (with all the hacking being done everywhere). http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=19516.0 http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=19516.0
- pavel_lishin 15y agoKeep hoping: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2656837 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2656837
- bradleyland 15y agoThe title of an article I read recently comes to mind, "You don't know the problem." That is, creating an un-hackable system isn't the problem. It's probably unrealistic to expect that anyone will ever create a completely un-hackable system. Rather, one should design their systems to fail gracefully under attack. If someone breaks in to my Citibank account, it doesn't much matter to me, because the banks have the authority to roll back transactions with the push of a button. Their power to do so is the greatest layer of security in the whole system; just as we have seen with Mt Gox. Unfortunately, Mt Gox is not bitcoin, it's simply an exchange, so it's once removed from bitcoin itself. The owner of that account still lost $1000, and no one can reverse it. Contrast that with bitcoin, and you can begin to see the problem. This is a fundamental issue with all currencies, not just bitcoin. It's a trade-off. When you hold currency, you hold responsibility for securing it. If I kept $500k in USD (paper currency, bonds, whatever) under my mattress, I'd have no recourse if someone broke in to my house and stole it. That is why I'm ok with keeping my money in a bank. I give up a lot for it, but I gain a lot of security.
- ebaysucks 15y agoI can't login at MtGox at the moment. What's the best measure to take now? I'm assuming MtGox will reset the passwords for those with an email account associated. Not sure what they will do for those without, hopefully they have IP logs for those accounts?
- Tichy 15y agoI wonder - if you have a payout BitCoin address configured in MtGox, you should somehow be able to prove that it is your address? Not sure - but might be a good idea to investigate that?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- gst 15y agoThread is locked - anyone who can provide a mirror? Edit: Just Google for the URL to find the respective Rapidshare link.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoWho wants to team up and replace MtGox? This is absurd. Anyone with a clue about anything knows better than to use unsalted MD5 or better yet, can imagine better ways to partition security for a system to prevent this, and at the very least can implement measures to prevent mass withdrawl without having to revert to transactional rollback after the fact. Really sad. Was MtGox first? Why did they have so much volume anyway?
- omouse 15y agoMtGox was first and they also overcame the barrier of payment processing. Payment processing is ALWAYS a bitch which is why people like bitcoin ;p
- lwat 15y agoFun fact: not long ago 'MtGox' meant 'Magic the Gathering online exchange'
- llambda 15y agoThere's still Trade Hill[0] I guess... Although it would be fun. Edit: And perhaps a good chance to use bcrypt over say MD5 or SHA256. I'm surprised bcrypt wasn't the go-to implementation. [0] https://tradehill.com/ https://tradehill.com/
- Ixiaus 15y agoYou would be surprised how few developers know about bcrypt. I didn't learn about it till the Gawker attacks and all of the amazing threads by the tptacek and the other crypto guys that wouldn't stop saying "use bcrypt!*.
- Locke1689 15y agoBcrypt is nice but anyone attempting to kid themselves that they're creating secure webapps should at least know security standards like PBKDF2. It's in practically every good crypto library, as well.
- gst 15y agoSeems that "mining" the MD5 passwords is now more profitable than directly mining Bitcoins - at least there's some GPU power out there ;)
- astrodust 15y agoMD5? Are you kidding me? There should be capital punishment in software development for things like that.
- vog 15y agoIt is not so much about MD5, but more about not using a random salt for each password. Stronger hash algorithms such as SHA-1 suffer exactly the same issues when used improperly (i.e. when stored without salt, or data is exchanged without HMAC). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_%28cryptography%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_%28cryptography%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC
- wlll 15y agoI'll just leave this here: http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/ http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/
- dave1010uk 15y agoFor reference, I just receied this email from MtGox. I'm fortunate in that my MtGox password is not used for anything else. Edit: the email was longer than I expected and formatting messed up a bit on HN so here's a pastebin link: http://pastebin.com/H5bgDYhC http://pastebin.com/H5bgDYhC
- palish 15y agoJust got an email from MtGox. Here are the important bits: "If you were using the same password on Mt.Gox and other places (email, etc), you should change this password as soon as possible." "While the password is encrypted, it is possible to bruteforce most passwords with time, and it is likely bad people are working on this right now." Son of a...
- ltamake 15y agoJust got this too. Fortunately, I use different passwords for everything. But a lot of people don't. I was able to find 520 occurrences of the "password" MD5 in a search in the leaked database so far. Still searching.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- rb2k_ 15y agoA question to people that have a more active crypto knowledge than I do: I have a 13 character password with letters, numbers and punctuation. I also seem to have one of the salted ($1$) passwords. How much in trouble am I really?
- Joakal 15y agoSeveral months I think assumed according to this: http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi The article is 2 years old. There are botnets that I presume could do ~50 billion/sec now (Number pulled out of ass).
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- drivebyacct2 15y agoAs a note, a user named <TD> has join #bitcoin-dev purporting to be from Google. They are restricting access to compromised accounts and sending out texts to change passwords. They stared with plaintext-passworded users but it appears it will include everyone. I don't know the legitimacy of these claims, but based on some of the comments here and in #bitcoin, it appears to be quite legitimate.
- saalweachter 15y agoThis might be a good time to remind everyone to sign up for two-factor authentication with GMail. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-security-for-your.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-secu...
- andypants 15y agoI can't login to my gmail account now... damnit! Can anybody help? I filled out one of google's forms but I'm afraid it'll just be bot-processed :[ Edit: Here's what happened: I got reports that my gmail account had suspicious activity so I had to reset my password. Unfortunately I already had a different password, and when I reset it, I changed it to the one that was hacked (I didn't know it was hacked yet). So google, trying to be awesome, made me change my password, and now I can't get into my account... I'm kicking myself so hard right now. My gmail account's got six years of my life in it... whoever's got it has every tiny detail about me... and it's terrifying.
- ltamake 15y agoFacebook might step in, too. They did for the LulzSec leaks.
- palish 15y agoI just changed the password to my gmail account. If my gmail account is suddenly restricted, I will be one unhappy bitcoin'er.
- theatrus2 15y agoI didn't actually use Mtgox (just was registered), and received a lock-out and reset message from Google. Good thing that password was unique and not shared with other accounts.
- mcs 15y agoSigh. Everybody was warned.
- tibbon 15y agoPerhaps 100% unrelated, but for the first time since its launch I just got a 'suspicious activity' notice when I tried to log onto my Google Accounts/Gmail within the past hour. I got in ok and changed my password drastically, however one of the first emails I got of course was one from MtGox letting me know about this. Probably unconnected, but I could imagine them trying to take a hit on a lot of registered Gmail accounts after they got the information. I only signed up for an MtGox account, but I've never traded with it or really used Bitcoin.
- wcoenen 15y agoAll gmail addresses in the leaked file (including mine) got this notice. It's just a precaution from google. I'm a bit annoyed that they didn't just sign me out and suggest a password change rather than force it (since I already use their 2-step authentication scheme and use different passwords for everything). On the other hand I'm happy to know that Google cares so much about the security of my account.
- tibbon 15y agoHmm, figuring this is just likely (hopefully?) my iPhone or something, but my gmail shows an account login using IMAP from United States (MI) (198.228.226.x) about an hour ago. I've never been to that state. EDIT: Nevermind, my have been my phone or something, because MaxMind is showing that IP as Ohio (where I am).
- grimen 15y agoAs I say: Don't trust a programmer in a suit...or that writes backends with PHP.
- grimen 15y agoReason: Most .NET/PHP-programmers just don't care about readable code nor security per definition; it's strongly bound to the reason they picked this language from the start. ...or to quote the creator of PHP: http://axonflux.com/5-quotes-by-the-creator-of-php-rasmus-lerdorf http://axonflux.com/5-quotes-by-the-creator-of-php-rasmus-le...
- scarmig 15y agoI don't doubt that most .NET/PHP programmers don't give a crap about security. Is this any different from RoR or Django, though?
- sunchild 15y agoPeople talk a lot of trash about frameworks like Rails, but I can spin up a shell application with bcrypt authentication via devise, roles-based authorization via cancan or declarative authorization, built-in CSRF protection, and better-than-decent default XSS protection in less than 30 minutes. Granted, it's not perfect security-wise, but it beats the crap out of whatever mish-mash leads to this meltdown...or the one Citi had...or the one Sony had...or other one...etc. I think security is one of the few areas where convention over configuration pays off by sidestepping lazy/sloppy approaches.
- mtcox 15y agoI bought some bitcoins on MtGox a month or so ago. My email address was among those in the leaked database. I received a message from MtGox about the security breach, and shortly thereafter from an anonymous user hoping to profit: Dear Sir or Madam, A few hours ago the Bitcoin trading website Mt Gox has been hacked. Malicious individuals have been able to obtain a database containing usernames, email address and encrypted passwords. This information has been posted publicly on the internet. As a Bitcoin supporter I'm now sending a message to every email address contained in the hacked database. This is to warn you that your username, email address and password have been leaked. I therefore strongly advice you to change your passwords. If you have used the same password on different websites it's highly recommended to change your password on all of your accounts! For a more secure alternative to Mt Gox, the community appears to be moving to TradeHill. So this is no reason to lose faith in Bitcoin itself. It must be seen as a warning that not every website can be trusted with your data however! Their link is removed (Note: You can remove the Referral Code when registering if you want!) This is certainly not the only website where you can exchange Bitcoins, also check out removed Sincerely, A Bitcoin supporter (bitcoin address removed)
- suninwinter 15y agoI have received the following email 6 times, edited to remove referral code and Bitcoin address: "Dear Sir or Madam, A few hours ago the Bitcoin trading website Mt Gox has been hacked. Malicious individuals have been able to obtain a database containing usernames, email address and encrypted passwords. This information has been posted publicly on the internet. As a Bitcoin supporter I'm now sending a message to every email address contained in the hacked database. This is to warn you that your username, email address and password have been leaked. I therefore strongly advice you to change your passwords. If you have used the same password on different websites it's highly recommended to change your password on all of your accounts! For a more secure alternative to Mt Gox, the community appears to be moving to TradeHill. So this is no reason to lose faith in Bitcoin itself. It must be seen as a warning that not every website can be trusted with your data however! Their link is http://www.tradehill.com/?r=XXXXXXX http://www.tradehill.com/?r=XXXXXXX (Note: You can remove the Referral Code when registering if you want!) This is certainly not the only website where you can exchange Bitcoins, also check out http://www.thebitcoinlist.com/dp_bitcoin/bitcoin-exchange/ http://www.thebitcoinlist.com/dp_bitcoin/bitcoin-exchange/ Sincerely, A Bitcoin supporter 1XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX7" If the sender is reading this, your script works (too well), and the warning was received 2 1/2 hours after the one from Mt. Gox, so you probably should have saved yourself the trouble. The From headers shows the email is sent from Bitcoin@unknown.com. However, digging into the headers it is actually coming from gXXXXXXX@bXXXXXXXXXX.gXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com (trying to give the guy some privacy, since he's trying to be helpful, but this way others who get the message can correlate it).
- soult 15y agoHow is that helpful? a) Every user of MtGox already received a message from MtGox directly telling them about the breach. His message did not add any new information at all. b) He advertises for two direct competitor to MtGox, in once ase using what I assume is a referral link where he earns a comission for each trade. c) He solicits donations for himself. d) He does not give out his name and uses an invalid return address to hide his motifs. e) He sent the message 6 times.