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6.5 Million LinkedIn Password Hashes Leaked
- eddieplan9 14y agoQuickly check if your password has been cracked: http://crackedin.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ http://crackedin.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ It will not send your password over the wire. It won't even send the SHA1 hash over the wire.
- KenCochrane 14y agoUse http://leakedin.org http://leakedin.org to find out if your password was hacked.
- lordlicorice 14y ago`pass` is uncracked?
- antithesis 14y agoIt's nice to see a page translated through Google on the front page. It's an indication that technology is breaking some barriers.
- joelhaasnoot 14y agoDatabase is available here https://disk.yandex.net/disk/public/?hash=pCAcIfV7wxXCL/YPhObEEH5u5PKPlp%2BmuGtgOEptAS4%3D https://disk.yandex.net/disk/public/?hash=pCAcIfV7wxXCL/YPhO... (Source: twitter, haven't looked at it myself)
- sneak 14y agoI miss the days where wget/curl worked to download files from the web.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mkjones 14y agoThose just look like hashes - are there usernames / salts somewhere? They do indeed seem to be salted.
- tocomment 14y agoHow can you tell?
- Anderkent 14y agoNot finding 'password', 'foobar', '1234' suggests salted passwords.
- tocomment 14y agoVery good point. Although some sites have password rules that would prevent those.
- arkx 14y agoThe hash list posted might be incomplete.
- Ecio78 14y agocheck jgrahamc post at the top
- mikeash 14y ago'password' and 'foobar' are both in there. '1234' is not, but that's probably because of a minimum length requirement. Edit: '12345678' is in there, further bolstering the length requirement theory.
- Dexec 14y agoCorrect. From LinkedIn: "Passwords are case-sensitive and must be at least 6 characters."
- pimeys 14y ago
- jnorthrop 14y agoOther sources are starting to report this as well: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/unscrewing-security/2012/06/if-it-turns-out-that-linkedin-passwords-have-leaked/index.htm http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/unscrewing-security/2012/06... http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/06/06/bad-day-for-linkedin-6-5-million-hashed-passwords-reportedly-leaked-change-yours-now/?awesm=tnw.to_1EhVq&utm_campaign=social%20media&utm_medium=Spreadus&utm_source=Twitter&utm_content=Bad%20day%20for%20LinkedIn:%206.5%20million%20hashed%20passwords%20reportedly%20leaked%20-%20change%20yours%20now http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/06/06/bad-day-for-lin...
- smoyer 14y agoI wonder how many LinkedIn users use the same passwords for all their accounts. The article talks about identity theft and "confidential contacts" but I think the real danger is that people tend to use the same password everywhere. It's their other accounts that might have real value. EDIT - As I think about it, e-mail accounts would be especially valuable as most of your other sites could be compromised using the "recover my password via e-mail" feature if the hacker could read the resulting mail.
- jere 14y agoMe. Admittedly, it's stupid as hell, but has generally been too much of a pain to do anything else (for things outside of banking, email). I've started to get serious about KeePass lately, but I bet a significant percentage of users take the lazy approach.
- esbwhat 14y agojust use a couple of shitty passwords for sites you don't care about, and remember the other ones. E.g. my hacker news account would probably be relatively unproblematic to compromise. If that were to happen, I'd just make a new one though.
- pcopley 14y agoBut what about your kar- nevermind.
- jere 14y agoHa. I'm in the same boat. This is my second account after the first one got ghost banned (for a single comment and the followups attempting to explain).
- fffggg 14y agoI take things a step further -- I have no idea what my password is on sites like HN or reddit. If the cookie is ever gone, my account is gone. I don't like the idea of identity permanence. Instead of shitty passwords though, why not use something like 1Password to store the logins? I use that (or an old fashioned piece of paper in a secure location) for meaningful security tokens.
- chli 14y agoThe forum they are talking about apparently (found using google) http://forum.insidepro.com/viewtopic.php?p=96122&sid=13341ef728d68f51bb893e4acde1219d http://forum.insidepro.com/viewtopic.php?p=96122&sid=133...
- smoyer 14y agoThe Hacker News effect seems to have taken the forums off-line. If you need a quick DDOS and don't have a botnet handy, just post the link here!
- joelhaasnoot 14y agoMight also be the fact it's all over twitter.
- chli 14y agohttps://www.dropbox.com/s/dsiuavbbzt8cy7g/forum.insidepro.com-viewtopic.php-p%3D96122.zip https://www.dropbox.com/s/dsiuavbbzt8cy7g/forum.insidepro.co... A saved copy of my local cache...
- madethemcry 14y agoI just looked into the file (combo_not.txt). There are only hashes. Who decided that the hashes posted in the forum are related to linkedin in any way ? Thank you.
- jackalope 14y agoThose paranoid tinfoil-hat wearing lunatics that generate absurdly long unique random passwords for every site are wringing their hands with glee because they found the hash of their LinkedIn password in the file. You're welcome.
- judofyr 14y ago> - With a computer of 8,000 NOK (~ 1400 USD), you can do a few hundred million attempts per second. Are you kidding me? LinkedIn stored their passwords using (salted) SHA1 using no iterations? Jesus.
- avar 14y agoTo expand on that, to store passwords don't just use salt+sha1, or try to do your own nested sha1, just use bcrypt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt
- chrisaycock 14y agoBetter still, use scrypt. HN's very own @cperciva wrote it. http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html It requires a lot more memory to brute-force it, thereby defeating any speed gains from parallelism.
- raverbashing 14y agoTHANK YOU "use bcrypt" has become an HN meme, with all the bad implications of it As if scrypt, pbkdf2 didn't exist. Or as if bcrypt has always existed and doesn't have any weakness
- carbocation 14y agoIf a database of bcrypted passwords from LNKD had been leaked, we'd be having a totally different conversation right now. (Same, of course, with scrypt etc.)
- raverbashing 14y agoLike you can't break bcrypt... The weakest link, either in bcrypt or MD5 is the password quality. Of course, in pure MD5 today you're a google search away and modern computers can eat salted MD5 for breakfast But the easiest passwords are going to be broken first
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- smiler 14y agoI've just downloaded the database linked and it only contains the hashed passwords, not the account usernames / e-mail addresses. I wonder if someone has the account details to match up otherwise you've no idea which password belongs to who, and you'd hope that LinkedIn would have lockout functionality.
- jere 14y agoAgreed. That seems rather useless. How would that happen anyway? The usernames stored in a different database/table from the hashes?
- joelhaasnoot 14y agoThey might need help cracking the hashes, keeping the usernames behind for their own exploits.
- nakkiel 14y agoOr they may use this as an advertisment for selling the actual dataset.
- hoov 14y agoLinkedIn allows you to sign in using any of your verified email addresses, so it seems likely that the usernames are at least stored in a different table.
- snorkel 14y ago... but still, a head wag at LinkedIn for using weak hashing, which I'm guessing means MD5.
- DaveChild 14y agoMD5 isn't the issue - it's the lack of salting. Without a salt, almost any hash can be cracked with a rainbow table. With a salt, you'd need to know the salt for each hash, and then generate a new rainbow table, in order to recover the original password.
- jameswyse 14y agoDoes anyone know what encryption scheme LinkedIn uses?
- lhnz 14y agoYou don't mean encryption. Passwords should be hashed.
- kristofferR 14y agoHashing scheme, not encryption scheme. Anyway, they use Unsalted SHA-1, a really weak option.
- jameswyse 14y agoIndeed yeah, I meant hashing. I only build tiny websites compared to linkedin and even I take the time to use a proper hashing scheme with a salt. Shame on you, LinkedIn.
- StavrosK 14y agoCan we please start using BrowserID or some other standard so we can secure that one provider and do away with all this? I'd like it if we could authenticate with Google using 2-factor authentication and be less worried about my password getting hacked.
- scrrr 14y agoA single point of failure sounds dangerous. People should just avoid using the same password for different websites. (That's what KeePass is for..) Perhaps a clever extension / browser feature could ensure that. (e.g. "Warning: You are probably using the same password for facebook.com")
- pilif 14y agoBy centralizing authentication, you make that central provider an even bigger target and you risk losing access to other services as you lose your main account (Google is known to sometimes terminate accounts with no way of recurse). Finally, when that central provider gets hacked, all your dependent services are now also compromised. And as we know from the CloudFlare story over the weekend, not even Google with their 2 factor authentication is devoid of issues. No. Centralizing your login to one third-party as as bad as the current practice of reusing your password for every service you have an account with. The only way that is reasonably safe is to use different random credentials for every service and store these credentials somewhere under your (and only your) control (i.e. a password manager or a piece of paper)
- joeyh 14y agoBrowserid is not a centralized authentication protocol. Although currently all implementations I know of rely on browserid.org, this is not required by its design. There's also the fully decentralized openid, you know. I'd 100% rather be able to use openid for sites like Linkedin and this one than rely on every site implementing sane password management.
- unimpressive 14y agoWhy can't we just use good old PGP? There is no reason why we should centralize password management and put the world's authentication into one giant pinata for black hats to take a swing at.
- sparknlaunch 14y agoWhen Twitter recently had accounts and passwords leaked, many were attached to spam accounts or duplicate records. Most had obvious passwords (like 1234). Are these legitimate active accounts? Can you do anything with the hashed passwords alone?
- ecaron 14y agoIn fairness to Twitter, it was never actually known if the accounts/passwords came from Twitter.com (proper) or (more likely) leaked from some 3rd-party Twitter-integrating app that had pre-OAuth integration.
- tocomment 14y agoThis makes me wonder. I've been relying on Django's built in user authentication lately. Does anyone know if that's pretty safe? Is it doing the right thing for hashing passwords?
- Glowbox 14y agoDisclaimer: I am not a cryptographic expert. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/ https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/ Django by default uses the PBKDF2 algorithm, which is better than nothing/md5/no salt sha1. I'd use bcrypt or scrypt by default, better be safe than sorry.
- masklinn 14y ago> which is better than nothing/md5/no salt sha1. It's also better than salted sha1 since it performs multiple iteration rounds leading to (configurable) higher computational complexity.
- ams6110 14y agoPBKDF2 is way better than salted hashes. It's right there with bcrypt and scrypt on the "good choices" list.
- leif 14y agoPbkdf2 is extremely good. Without deeper analysis (or a feature comparison) I'd be hesitant to say that bcrypt or scrypt are better.
- tptacek 14y agoI sincerely mean no offense but this statement came directly out of your butt. Read the table on page 14 of Colin Percival's Usenix paper "Stronger Key Derivation Via Sequential Memory-Hard Functions" (which you could have found by Googling [scrypt paper]); PBKDF2 is ~5x faster (ie: costs ~5x less to break) than bcrypt; PBKDF2 and scrypt aren't even in the same ballpark. From exactly where did you derive the idea that PBKDF2 is "extremely good"? The reality is that all three of PBKDF2, bcrypt, and scrypt are just fine. But PBKDF2 and scrypt have drastically poorer library support than bcrypt; nobody should delay using a strong password hash so that they can optimize which one they use.
- tintin 14y agoI know a lot of companies just keep your account including your password in there database while you removed your account. Can I be sure my account was totally removed when I removed my LinkedIn account? Because the "please change your password as soon as possible" won't help me much.
- finnw 14y agoAs long as: 1. They do not have a mechanism to resurrect your account and 2. You do not use the same password elsewhere then it should not matter.
- jurre 14y agoThere should be a huge banner on linked in urging users to change their passwords in my opinion.
- bgilroy26 14y agoEven more important to change password on other sites if you use the same email/password combo there
- moondowner 14y agoYou can generate your own SHA1 for your password and check if it's existing in the txt file. http://jssha.sourceforge.net/ http://jssha.sourceforge.net/
- pjscott 14y agoOr, if you don't trust random web sites, we can turn this into the next fizzbuzz: $ python -c 'import hashlib; print hashlib.sha1("hunter2").hexdigest()' This will print the SHA1 hash of "hunter2".
- madsr 14y agoWhat riddles me though, is how come 6.5 million? LinkedIn has what, 150M users? Did they not post the entire load (and are in fact sitting on _all_ the hashes?) Is the dump an old backup or breach from when they had fewer accounts? Is it just one DB partition / file that's been lost, an archive?
- revelation 14y agoGiven that these hashes are not salted, running a 'uniq' on the list of all users' password hashes would probably already cut it by half, if not more. Then you eliminate all the easy ones from wordlists, and post the remains on the internet for people with excess computing power to bruteforce.
- leif 14y agoMy password shouldn't be easy, and wasn't in the list.
- 16s 14y agoThey are already unique and sorted. sort -u combo_not.txt | wc -l 6458020 wc -l combo_not.txt 6458020
- biot 14y agoI assume the first line you meant to pipe it through uniq afer the sort? Otherwise the only thing you've demonstrated is that sorting a file doesn't change its line count. :)
- JoshTriplett 14y ago"sort -u" means "sort and uniq".
- biot 14y agoWow, I can't believe I was never aware of this. Thank you!
- Zirro 14y agoThey just tweeted this: https://twitter.com/LinkedIn/status/210356987576324096 https://twitter.com/LinkedIn/status/210356987576324096 - "Our team is currently looking into reports of stolen passwords. Stay tuned for more."
- Aqua_Geek 14y agoAnd a follow-up: "Our team continues to investigate, but at this time, we're still unable to confirm that any security breach has occurred. Stay tuned here." https://twitter.com/LinkedIn/status/210390233076875264 https://twitter.com/LinkedIn/status/210390233076875264
- Splines 14y agoIf people are finding their unique password's hashes in the database, that's pretty damning evidence that a security breach has occurred.
- tazzy531 14y agoGood Guy Startup Founder would cross reference this password list with their own password system and force those that match to reauthenticate and change their passwords. This wouldn't be difficult to do and your users would appreciate it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mibbitier 14y agoPossible that they only uploaded the "hard" ones. Looks from other comments here that people have found their own passwords, unsalted.
- Xion 14y agoI've found '1234678', 'password', 'qwerty', 'linkedin' and few other common phrases (already 00000'd, obviously), so it doesn't look like a list of just the hard ones.
- philip1209 14y agoOr, they could take the Zappos route and just force everybody to reset their passwords. This route would make adopting a different (e.g. salted) password system quite straightforward.
- jere 14y agoHow would one cross-reference this list unless you're storing the plain text passwords?
- ryusage 14y agoThe released passwords are hashed with SHA1. Assuming you use the same algorithm and linkedin does not use a salt (they probably do), then you could just compare the hashes.
- swombat 14y agoAm I glad that I use LastPass and have a different, 12-character password for every service? Why, yes, yes, I am. I've now changed my LinkedIn password, too, just in case.
- jgrahamc 14y agoI'm even happier I don't have a LinkedIn account.
- lemming 14y agoI've been tempted to delete mine several times recently. Looks like now is the moment.
- llimllib 14y agoYou're free to hit "delete" on linkedin, but there's a very high likelihood that it will only mean "hide my profile". Anyone who got your user/pass would probably be able to reinstantiate your account and do anything to it they wanted.
- jpeavy1 14y agoagree; don't just delete, suicidemachine.org
- dredmorbius 14y agoI took the step of markedly decreasing the information on my current legit profile. It includes my name and general title, but no job history. Public disclosures of connections, etc., are highly limited. Having a fictional LinkedIn account can be amusing.
- Zirro 14y agoWhat's kept me away from such solutions are these questions: How can you trust one service with all your passwords? What if their configuration has a vulnerability?
- ragmondo 14y agoI wrote a short article about this kind of stuff - if it's really my data, then let me use my lock on it : http://ragmondocom.appspot.com/2012/03/My-Stuff-My-Lock http://ragmondocom.appspot.com/2012/03/My-Stuff-My-Lock Then I get to choose what strength lock I put on it.
- cheald 14y agoFirst rule of software design: users are lazy. Second rule of software design: users are stupid. "Use your own lock" is fine for us Übergeeks, but for the vast majority of the populace, they just want the provider to put a system in place so they don't have to worry about it.
- Smerity 14y ago"We were curious what would happen to our share price if our company did something incredibly stupid" The above comment might seem incredibly harsh, but really, there's no good excuse for a site this prominent to not have a salted, secure password hashing system. Even if they started with an unsalted password system, users can be migrated to the newer more secure system on next login. The only way I could regain respect for LinkedIn is if we find that these unsalted hashes were from users who never logged in to LinkedIn after the security upgrade. From the replies of other HN users who have found their password hashes in the leaked list, this doesn't seem to be the case though. I can understand database leaks. Bad things happen. Not being prepared for such an event however is where I draw the line. These leaks impact users far beyond just the site at fault. It's not enough to say users should use LastPass. They don't, and that's the world we live in, for better or worse. If computer security doesn't take into account problematic users, then it's flawed computer security.
- pixelcort 14y agoRegarding requiring users to log in; wouldn't it be better to run their current hash through another password hashing scheme (while we're at it bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF, etc)? Then, the next time they log in, verify them by running their password through the old algorithm, and the result through the new one.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Cushman 14y agoThat could be a good transition strategy if you're worried about being compromised before all your users have logged in again, but you would still want to move them over to using just the new system when they do. It probably would be fine, but when it comes to crypto you don't take chances when you don't have to.
- peteretep 14y agoYep. Here is a treatment of that: https://gist.github.com/1051238 https://gist.github.com/1051238
- slig 14y agoLooks like they were too busy tuning their Spam All Your Friends (TM) "invitation" feature to bother with proper ways to store passwords.
- bonaldi 14y agoGiven they haven't confirmed they've found and closed the leak, is it wise for everyone to be changing their passwords already?
- Aissen 14y agoGiven many people have confirmed that their uniquely generated password is in the list, is it wise to wait any longer before changing your password ?
- bonaldi 14y agoI guess you need to do both: change your password, but to something throwaway. Then when the hole is closed, change it again.
- vecinu 14y agoI'm not sure what you're implying. How have they 'closed the leak'? If you find your hash in the list, you should change your password. If you don't, you should change your password. I use LastPass to manage my passwords so I just generated another random 20+ char password and forgot about it.
- bonaldi 14y agoThe point is that LinkedIn haven't even confirmed they know how the passwords were stolen (they haven't even confirmed they were stolen, yet). In that case, when you change your password and feel all secure again, what's to say the hackers haven't just lifted your new hash as well?
- vecinu 14y agoThat's a fair point.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
- miniatureape 14y agoI didn't see it in the post, but does anyone know if these were current passwords (as of this post)? I use a unique password for linked-in, but some number of months ago I used a password I shared with another site. Wondering if I need to change that one too. Guess I might as well.
- madmaze 14y agoI confirmed mine is in the dump as well
- mutagen 14y agoMine as well, unbroken (not prefixed with the 00000) in the original file.
- fluidcruft 14y agoCan anyone tell me where I can change my password on LinkedIn? I must be dense.
- nodata 14y agohttps://www.linkedin.com/uas/change-password https://www.linkedin.com/uas/change-password It's buried under "your name" (top right) > settings > password > change (just below your e-mail, left side)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- re_todd 14y agoAssuming LinkedIn used SHA1 unsalted passwords and will continue to do so, and many of us do not want to delete our LinkedIn accounts, what should be the minimum number of characters we should use in our new password? 15? 20? 100? (I know, 100 is probably higher than they allow)
- re_todd 14y agoI just reset to a 22 character password, so I know that number of characters is allowable at least.
- Aissen 14y agoIf you want to check if your password is in there: read -s a zgrep $(echo -n "$a" | sha1sum | cut -d' ' -f1 | \ sed -e 's/^...../00000/') combo_not.zip unset a
- akavel 14y agoAccording to jgrahamc's investigation, this will probably check if your password is there and is cracked already. To check if the hash is there, although uncracked yet, you should probably remove the sed call from pipeline.
- Aissen 14y agoOh. You're right, I missed that. New command line: read -s a; zgrep --color -E $(hash=$(echo -n "$a" | sha1sum | cut -d' ' -f1); echo -n "$hash|$(echo $hash | sed -e 's/^...../00000/')" ) combo_not.zip ; unset a
- jgrahamc 14y agoSome observations on this file: 0. This is a file of SHA1 hashes of short strings (i.e. passwords). 1. There are 3,521,180 hashes that begin with 00000. I believe that these represent hashes that the hackers have already broken and they have marked them with 00000 to indicate that fact. Evidence for this is that the SHA1 hash of 'password' does not appear in the list, but the same hash with the first five characters set to 0 is. 5baa61e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8 is not present 000001e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8 is present Same story for 'secret': e5e9fa1ba31ecd1ae84f75caaa474f3a663f05f4 is not present 00000a1ba31ecd1ae84f75caaa474f3a663f05f4 is present And for 'linkedin': 7728240c80b6bfd450849405e8500d6d207783b6 is not present 0000040c80b6bfd450849405e8500d6d207783b6 is present 2. There are 2,936,840 hashes that do not start with 00000 that can be attacked with JtR. 3. The implication of #1 is that if checking for your password and you have a simple password then you need to check for the truncated hash. 4. This may well actually be from LinkedIn. Using the partial hashes (above) I find the hashes for passwords linkedin, LinkedIn, L1nked1n, l1nked1n, L1nk3d1n, l1nk3d1n, linkedinsecret, linkedinpassword, ... 5. The file does not contain duplicates. LinkedIn claims a user base of 161m. This file contains 6.4m unique password hashes. That's 25 users per hash. Given the large amount of password reuse and poor password choices it is not improbable that this is the complete password file. Evidence against that thesis is that password of one person that I've asked is not in the list.
- dpritchett 14y agoFor the security novices amongst us: I had no idea how to do this so I figured out a quick python script to test it: >>> from hashlib import sha1 >>> def check_pass(plaintext, offset=5): hashed = sha1(plaintext).hexdigest() return (hashed, '0' * offset + hashed[offset:]) >>> check_pass("linkedin") ('7728240c80b6bfd450849405e8500d6d207783b6', '0000040c80b6bfd450849405e8500d6d207783b6') Edit: I'm pretty sure JtR refers to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Ripper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Ripper
- peterwwillis 14y agoObligatory perl one-liner: perl -MDigest::SHA -le '$h = substr( Digest::SHA::sha1_hex($ARGV[0]) , 5 ); open F, "<combo_not.txt"; do { print "found $_" if grep(/$h/, $_) } while (<F>)' password (for people without shells)
- jrabone 14y agoThere's an English-language article (rather than a translation) at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18338956 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18338956
- steve8918 14y agoHas any legitimate sources confirmed that the usernames were also stolen along with these hashes? Or were only the hashes stolen? Could this just be an elaborate hoax where someone generated 6.5M SHA1 hashes and said that they hacked linkedin? Maybe someone shorted LNKD and then leaked this, hoping for a monetary gain?
- slig 14y agoSomeone in this thread stated that his non-common password is hashed on the list so, very unlikely.
- aparadja 14y agoCracking the passwords from the hashes is not just fast, it's ridiculously fast. I can't believe a site like LinkedIn stores their passwords this way in 2012. guesses: 11516 time: 0:00:21:36 0.00% (3) c/s: 27126G trying: aptewwod - aptewws1 That's plain old john the ripper running on the cheapest 13" 2010 mbp. John is not even using the GPU, and non-trivial 8-character passwords are scrolling by in my terminal, too fast to read.
- instakill 14y agoWhy is there no notification on their website?
- bstar77 14y agoI have an ignorant question... when a SHA1 encrypted password is cracked, can the hackers actually identify what the unencrypted password is? I'm guessing no since SHA1 uses a hashing algorithm and only a brute force approach would potentially work...
- cschneid 14y ago"Cracking" in this sense is brute forcing. SHA1 is fast, and people use bad passwords. The combination means that you can run through lots and lots of bad passwords very quickly. I checked my linked in password I have stored in 1password, and it is 20+ chars with special characters and numbers. That won't be "cracked" in any meaningful sense, so I don't even worry about it. You are correct that there's currently no way to go from a hash to a value that hashes to it in SHA1 (AFAIK, IANYNSA [I am not your NSA]).
- akrasia 14y agoI'm not an expert in the field but from what I know, SHA1 is a one way function. When an encrypted password is cracked, YES, the hackers know that specific password. They brute forced it by guessing the password, running it through SHA1, and comparing the output to the hash. If they are the same, then they guessed the right password. They do not know any other passwords and if "salt" was used, they would have to brute force each password. I think salt wasn't used in this case so once they crack someone's password, they know every other user who used the same password. So if you and I used the same password, and they brute forced yours already, they will know that I have the same password.
- cjdavis 14y agoIt seems we will never get rid of bad programming like this. I hit the 'forgot my password' link on the T-Mobile website yesterday and the pop-up requested my T-Mobile phone number. Ten seconds later I received an SMS with my actual password in it.
- toyg 14y agoThe good thing is: every time this happens to a high-profile site, storing sensitive data, more people get more acquainted with the concepts of "you really should not use a simple password" and "you really should not use the same password across all sites". I know it works for me: this was the last straw that forced me to abandon a good ol' password I've been using since 1998. From now on I'll just rely on password managers (currently DataVault, but I know people who swear by LastPass).
- toyg 14y agoI wonder, what if this list wasn't leaked from LinkedIn databases, but rather from some third-party service using the "enter your password" anti-pattern? A flaky service like that would likely not be very good at safely storing passwords. Unfortunately, LinkedIn keeping mum on the subject makes it easy to speculate that it was actually coming from them. Otherwise it'd be easy to deny (and even spin: "How dare you! We never store unsalted hashes, we follow state-of-the-art practices here!!"). Also, their security track record is... embarrassing as it is.
- singlow 14y agoOf course, now their password change script is broken/overloaded.
- sopooneo 14y agoHow on earth were they not salting? There are so many open source auth systems now that get all the basics right. Someone who works at a big company like this and has any insight, please comment. How is this even possible in these days?
- pjscott 14y agoThere's still an unbelievable amount of ignorance out there about how to properly store hashed passwords. There are countless articles explaining that you need to hash the passwords, and telling you how to use md5("salt" + password), and then the blog comments are full of helpful people saying that you should use SHA256, or "no u also gots to add pepper", or exhorting the author to use a large unique salt from /dev/random (not /dev/urandom, it's not random enough) and then encrypt the salts in the database with 2048-bit RSA. I sometimes google around for these articles when I want some morbid fascination -- it's the intellectual equivalent of those YouTube videos where one car crashes into another, and then a third car crashes into the wreckage, and then another car tries to ramp over it and fails, and then everything explodes, and then the people staggering out of the destroyed cars start shouting bad advice about hash functions.
- kamaal 14y agoCan somebody recommend good reading material/book on how to handle passwords/encryption for practical everyday applications.
- alyandon 14y agoJust adding my two cents worth. This file looks legit as I have a long, complex password on linkedin and the sha1 hash for it is present in the dump.
- yashchandra 14y agois this confirmed to be real or a hoax ?
- flux_w42 14y agoAnd here is the (partially) decrypted version with 163267 passwords: http://www.mediafire.com/?bq8bd5iojp50zci http://www.mediafire.com/?bq8bd5iojp50zci
- hughw 14y agoEven after securing our own passwords, we are all still vulnerable to attacks where the attackers simulate members of our networks to discover private information like our connections, job history, etc.
- dredmorbius 14y agoUm, pardon the obvious question, but does someone have a direct link to the hash file?
- rfugger 14y agoFrom a slashdot comment: https://disk.yandex.net/disk/public/?hash=pCAcIfV7wxXCL/YPhObEEH5u5PKPlp+muGtgOEptAS4= https://disk.yandex.net/disk/public/?hash=pCAcIfV7wxXCL/YPhO...
- dredmorbius 14y agoThanks. For anyone trying: it's not a direct link, but a download page (JS required) which lets you d/l "combo_not.zip". Which has 6458020 lines of "00000"-prefixed hashes, apparently sorted.
- dredmorbius 14y agoI can confirm that my long-lived randomly generated single-use 12-character password hash is in the file, but not 00000-prefixed (apparently not broken). A more recent 20 character single-use randomly generated password was not, but the file doesn't comprise the full 6.5 million hashes noted in stories. I've since changed both for rather longer randomly generated single-use passwords.
- chrisacky 14y agoI've come to the conclusion that this list is genuine. While some people have said that they could't find their passwords in the list, I think this only points to the most probable reason in that this is a part list. Password: "needajob" Hash: e41b635974babd5d6e7d6dc68e8b3d2fc39938b2 Cracked: 0000035974babd5d6e7d6dc68e8b3d2fc39938b2
- statictype 14y agoI literally created my LinkedIn account only 2 days ago. And my password was in the list and cracked. Thankfully I don't use it for anything else.
- drewfrank 14y agoIs it unique enough that you can be sure it's your password, and not someone else's? I ask because the cracked passwords seem to be the simple/obvious ones that are likely to be used by multiple people. If it is strong/unique though, it would effectively confine the hack time to the last 2 days.
- daurnimator 14y agoCould be a dupe password? Is your password quite strong?
- yashchandra 14y agoI just changed my password. To test, I entered only letters and numbers all in lowercase. Linkedin accepts it even though the site says "should have upper case etc.".
- niels_olson 14y agocould some other folks who have this database repost it? The existing sources (yandex, the original .ru site) seem to be clobbered.
- whit537 14y agoHere are a couple links to the file: http://www.mediafire.com/?n307hutksjstow3 http://www.mediafire.com/?n307hutksjstow3 (RAR) https://disk.yandex.net/disk/public/?hash=pCAcIfV7wxXCL/YPhObEEH5u5PKPlp%2BmuGtgOEptAS4%3D https://disk.yandex.net/disk/public/?hash=pCAcIfV7wxXCL/YPhO... (ZIP)
- tantalor 14y agoMaybe they read this SO thread? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2019279/what-is-the-recommended-way-to-encrypt-user-passwords-in-a-database http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2019279/what-is-the-recom...
- weichi 14y agoIf we can't trust SO for security questions, where do we go to get them answered?
- finnw 14y agoThe SHA1 of my LinkedIn password naturally starts with "00000". I wonder if that would have thwarted the original cracking attempt. I'm almost disappointed that mine was not in the list.
- mcculley 14y agoI can confirm that my password was in there. I have changed it. My password was "98mnja6z" which hashes to 6475590bc1407aa98c8b022230292cce3d8528b3. I used this for no other sites, so I'm not concerned about it leaking. It is inexcusable that LinkedIn hasn't alerted their users yet.
- docubot 14y agoMine is also in there. It was also a randomly generated password used only on LinkedIn.
- dewatson 14y agoDid not find my password in the list in truncated or original form. Member since April 2010, did not change my password even once.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- smattiso 14y agoSorry where is the list?
- jqueryin 14y agoOn my own accord and not my employers, I'd like to invite developers to check out mojoLive as your career management tool. Our goals and vision are light years ahead of what LinkedIn has slowly become. Also, I dislike recruiters and spam. http://mojolive.com http://mojolive.com
- hangas 14y agoMy belief is that the hackers might get the username password combos, but they grouped the hashes to only have unique (sort -u ?) passwords hashes and therefore ease the process of dictionary cracking them as they do not have salts. The 00000 prefix might be an indication of this. I bet there is an automate script taking care of a dict attack and the file was released during execution.
- zer01 14y agoAnyone looking for the file to run these tests yourself -> http://clck.ru/d/jE6Mg-5X1ARpN http://clck.ru/d/jE6Mg-5X1ARpN
- geekin 14y agoTerribly sorry to ask this - but where did you guys get the file ?
- jneal 14y agoMy password isn't in the file, and yes I checked for a 0'd version as well. My password is 9 characters of lower case, upper case, numbers, and a symbol. I'm wondering if this is incomplete, or fake. Either way...if it is a vulnerability I suppose LinkedIn hasn't fixed it yet, or at least I haven't heard mention of this - thus even changing your password won't help much if they can just re-download the database. Thus making a long, complex password is the best course of action.
- mahyarm 14y agoA password I used many months ago (maybe almost a year now?) was in the list, but the password I use currently for many months was not on the list interestingly enough. This list is possibly pretty old, which means it happened quite a while ago.
- whileonebegin 14y agoA company as large and popular as LinkedIn uses no salt? Surprise.
- zenocon 14y agoIf this is legit, shouldn't LinkedIn be notifying users of the security breach?
- sakai 14y agoA question from the cryptographically uninitiated -- how (and how easily) can these hashes be linked to a user's account name/email?
- mynegation 14y agoMy password hash was in the file and it was cracked. It was a combination of 8 upper and lower case letters, digits and special characters. This is the case where size does matter and apparently passwords like my old one can be broken on GPU in minutes or hours nowadays. Quick sample from persons I polled: 2 password hashes were not in the file, 1 was there and cracked, 1 was there and not cracked yet. As bad as it is, this can be a great case to raise the awareness of good password management.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mistercow 14y agoI'm starting to think it might be wise, if you intend to reuse your password on multiple sites, to salt it yourself. By using a form like "<site name><user name><reused password", you protect yourself from rainbow tables without making your username harder to remember. And yes, yes, I know you shouldn't be reusing your password across different sites, or using a dictionary word anyway. And teenagers also shouldn't be drinking, doing drugs and having sex. It doesn't help anything to pretend that people are going to behave optimally. Of course, the preposterous restrictions that websites put on passwords, like maximum password length, will make this idea harder to put into practice.
- jwegan 14y agoI've been doing this myself and it has worked out pretty well so far. My password is in the list of passwords released, but is uncracked and I can rest assured knowing that I did not use the same password on any other website. A couple things to keep in mind: 1) The salt you generate should be put at the front in case the website is silently truncating the password to a certain length 2) The salt can be something more complicated than site name. I mentally calculate a fixed length salt based on the site name 3) You may want to still keep two separate "base" passwords, one for high value sites (banks, email) and one for low value sites (everything else).
- Imagenuity 14y agoMy old password was in the password file, and it was flagged as cracked. If you're a Windows user and you want to check if your password is in the file. (1) download the passwords file from http://www.mediafire.com/?n307hutksjstow3 (2) the download is a RAR file, so you'll need to have WinRAR installed to extract it. (3) to get the sha1 version of your password, go to duckduckgo.com and type: sha1 yourpassword (4) copy the result, except for the first 6 or so characters (5) open a DOS command prompt (WindowsKey+R and type CMD) (6) type (quotes required where indicated): find "sha1hash" sha1.txt (note: to paste to the command prompt is right-click) Example: The sha1 hash of the password 'password' is: 5baa61e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8 Remove first six characters: e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8 enter at command prompt: find "e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8" sha1.txt result: ---------- SHA1.TXT 000001e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8
- henkert 14y ago00000fac2ec84586f9f5221a05c0e9acc3d2e670 0000022c7caab3ac515777b611af73afc3d2ee50 deb46f052152cfed79e3b96f51e52b82c3d2ee8e 00000dc7cc04ea056cc8162a4cbd65aec3d2f0eb 00000a2c4f4b579fc778e4910518a48ec3d2f111 b3344eaec4585720ca23b338e58449e4c3d2f628 674db9e37ace89b77401fa2bfe456144c3d2f708 37b5b1edf4f84a85d79d04d75fd8f8a1c3d2fbde 00000e56fae33ab04c81e727bf24bedbc3d2fc5a 0000058918701830b2cca174758f7af4c3d30432
- ErikCorry 14y agoAm I the only one who is too paranoid to decompress a file that I know was created by a black hat... http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/security/Content/2005.12.21b.html http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/security/Content/2005.12.21...
- narrator 14y agoSo LinkedIn... Why are you not using bcrypt to has your passwords? http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/ http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/
- heliodor 14y agoAs much as I hate lawsuits, I'd love to see one or two major Internet companies sued in a class action lawsuit for negligence to serve as an example and a warning to the rest. This kind of behavior from a top tier internet presence is inexcusable!
- Hethrir 14y agoTorrent of database: http://www.seedpeer.me/details/4368981/linkedin-hashes.html http://www.seedpeer.me/details/4368981/linkedin-hashes.html Magnet link: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:VUPJHINO4KAWLWVLEKKFWKJVF3DVDDDR Torrent download: http://www.seedpeer.me/download/linkedin_hashes/ad1e93a1aee28165daab22945b29352ec7518c71 http://www.seedpeer.me/download/linkedin_hashes/ad1e93a1aee2...
- Zopieux 14y agoIt seems there are some duplicates, considering cracked hashes beginning with 000000. For instance, I found: passforlinkedin 00000610754c30b38d0c70b72b7e8210268cd9b7 b3534610754c30b38d0c70b72b7e8210268cd9b7
- sildani 14y agoMy LinkedIn's password hash (at the time, I changed it once news broke) was not listed. And it was a relatively weak password (8 characters, just lower case characters and numbers). I doubt this is LinkedIn's password dump.
- Aimes 14y agoMy old password is not on the list. However, it seems like somebody tried to log on to windows live with the e-mail address and password I was registered on linkedin with. This is one of my oldest passwords from when I still only had one or two passwords. I noticed this as window live kept sending another of my e-mail accounts a code needed to log in from an unrecognised computer. Now it could all be a coincidence, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a connection, as the e-mail address and the password were identical to the ones used on Linkedin. If that's the case there would be a more complete list with my password/hash as well as the associated e-mail address.
- mc32 14y agoI checked a few 6 char passwords (alphanum) some were not present. So they seem not to be bruteforcing them serially. Maybe just checking against other known tables.
- localhost007 14y agoHere is the original file... http://filevelocity.com/ixhk76jz07m5/SHA1.txt_1.rar http://filevelocity.com/ixhk76jz07m5/SHA1.txt_1.rar
- 925601568310 14y agoPutting people's personal details on the open web, giving anyone access, including malicious hackers... This design used by LinkedIn, as well as Facebook, was a bad idea from the beginning. Don't think they are not aware of the risks. How much spam and other annoyances do people get as a result? These companies are killing privacy just to make a quick buck. Maybe they'll be sued. Direct link to SHA1 file on mediafire (117MB) to avoid javascript, captchas, popups, etc. http://205.196.120.123/c2o80hrlhteg/n307hutksjstow3/SHA1.txt_1.rar http://205.196.120.123/c2o80hrlhteg/n307hutksjstow3/SHA1.txt...
- jonah 14y agoHmm, my (short alpha) password isn't in the list.
- dhughes 14y agoThe worst is I can't remember what password I used but don't want to change it because I want to know if it's one I used somewhere else not just reset it.
- 16s 14y agoJohn the Ripper released a patch for this modified sha1 hash type today. So no need for any manual hacks. You may download the patch here: http://openwall.info/wiki/john/patches http://openwall.info/wiki/john/patches
- bmacs 14y agoI just made an online too to check if your password is in the list: http://billsnitzer.com/linkedin/ http://billsnitzer.com/linkedin/
- jtchang 14y agoIs it scary to anyone else that LinkedIn can't confirm yet if their security was compromised?
- sturmeh 14y agoIf your hashed password is not in this list (trunucated or not) do not assume for a second that whoever leaked this list had to leak all their lists. Also note that according to other users, some of these hashes are at least 3 weeks old, they've had this list for some time.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- disclosure 14y agohttp://pastebin.com/JmtNxcnB http://pastebin.com/JmtNxcnB - 20k++ sample cracked passwords from LinkedIn hash dump released on June 6, 2012. They do appear legit and strong too. It's unfortunate that LinkedIn hashed them using unsalted SHA-1.
- sparknlaunch 14y agoWorth noting that some passwords belong to the dating website eHarmony. The dating site had a password beach last year. http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/06/8-million-leaked-passwords-connected-to-linkedin/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/06/8-million-leaked-pas... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/11/eharmony_data_breach/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/11/eharmony_data_breach...
- grannyg00se 14y agoHow does this benefit someone who is trying to access an account? There are no account names tied to these hashes. So even if you managed to find the clear text of each of these you would still be in a position where you have a list of over 6,000,000 passwords to work through in order to brute force your way in.
- disclosure 14y agoSearchable DB is available at http://dazzlepod.com/linkedin/ http://dazzlepod.com/linkedin/
- Ecio78 14y agoThey have added a blog post with an update http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/06/linkedin-member-passwords-compromised/ http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/06/linkedin-member-password... Unfortunately they dont tell when they started salting the password and if they've found (and fixed) the hole that permitted the database leak!
- bermanoid 14y agoWhatever manager it was that tasked some junior programmer (particularly one that didn't know that unsalted SHA1 is a terrible idea) with implementing the password system at LinkedIn needs to be fired. Making the programming mistake means that you don't know much about web security, and while not a great thing, that's forgivable; putting someone that's utterly unqualified for code with security implications on such an important task is not. Nor is letting the code get deployed without having someone that knows what to look for review it. Nor is letting such a bad decision remain live for...what is it now, almost 10 years? But let's not stop there. There are probably a dozen other people at the company whose job it is to avoid blunders like this, all the way up to the top technical staff. After all, LinkedIn is not, and has not been for some time now, some tiny underfunded startup. It's a goddamn public company, and even before that it was a super-team Silicon Valley darling that was getting money thrown at it since even before tech became cool to invest in again, and it's been valued at over a billion dollars for almost five years now. There is absolutely no excuse for this, they should have been doing regular security audits for years, and no audit worth its salt would miss something this simple. I absolutely refuse to believe that this problem was unknown, that nobody ever commented or filed a bug report about this code - no, this was deprioritized, because it wasn't considered a high enough value problem. And now it's bitten them in the ass and become a problem, probably because some other security vulnerability was similarly deprioritized instead of fixed. I expect this from some shady Bitcoin market that a high school kid runs off of a server in his bedroom. I do not expect this type of amateurism from a 10 billion dollar company with hundreds of engineers, many of whom have specifically looked over that code, some of whom have probably complained about it, and all of whom should know better than to let it fester...
- gizzlon 14y ago"I expect this from some shady Bitcoin market that a high school kid runs off of a server in his bedroom. I do not expect this type of amateurism from a 10 billion dollar company with hundreds of engineers.." Think you might be expecting too much from large companies =/
- adarshu 14y agoShocking that they didn't even use the basic technique of using salts before hashing!
- ctdh 14y agoNo sign of my password in there http://www.mediafire.com/?n307hutksjstow3 http://www.mediafire.com/?n307hutksjstow3, or my wife's. I checked both the full and the '00000' truncated hash for each. Neither of us had changed it for the last couple of years. So I guess it is only a subset of all the linkedin passwords? I have now changed my passwords anyway. By the way, the press say both the username and password were hacked, has anyone seen the list of usernames? They also say 6.4m passwords were hacked but this file only has 6.14m.
- alexvay 14y agoSo I changed my password through my PC yesterday, went to my Android client and, to my surprise, it is logged on the mobile! It's been more than 12 hours, and the access token for the mobile client is still connected to my account, despite changing my password. I would expect all tokens to be revoked on-password-change. Really disappointing. I'll have to set up an SSL proxy later to dump the traffic from Android, see what is happening. Anyone compiled SSLDump for Android?
- alexvay 14y agoSo I changed my password through my PC yesterday, went to my Android client and, to my surprise, it is logged in just fine! It's been more than 12 hours, and the access token for the mobile client is still connected to my account, despite changing my password. I would expect all tokens to be revoked on-password-change. Really disappointing.
- Gigel 14y agoObviously the list was filtered to eliminate duplicates. It contains only what the hackers wanted it to contain. So, why does nobody mentions that it is HIGHLY LIKELY that the user names associated with the passwords (which are actually mainly e-mail addresses for LinkedIn) are also in the possession of the hackers. So, if I would be the hacker - strip usernames, strip duplicate hashes, post list of unique hashes to let others do the CPU intensive cracking, retrieve cracked passwords, match with usernames (e-mail address), check same password on other accounts (first on the e-mail account, then google the e-mail address on forums or try on the services that interests me and say "forgot password, send it again to this e-mail address - thank you telling me that this e-mail has indeed an account with you..."), monetize somehow the data. As a user that implies - IMMEDIATELY change your password for the e-mail address used to login at LinkedIn (if it was the same password); verify if settings of this e-mail account have changed (like an additional unknown address added to allow retrieval of the password, DUH), try to remember where you use the same address either as login or to recover credentials, try to remember where you used the same password, google you e-mail address to help you remember; change passwords; consider abandoning the e-mail address if it is not your primary one,... Also - did the amount of SPAM that you receive on the e-mail address used to login at LinkedIn suddenly increased, while SPAM remained constant on a similar mail account not connected to LinkedIn ? Maybe someone just sold your e-mail address, so the LinkedIn break may affect you even if the password is not in the list. Bottom line is - LinkedIn approach appears to be: We have no proof that this particular account was hacked since password hash is not in the list - let's not overreact and let'sassume it is not hacked even if we don't have a clue what was actually hacked. I'm not to judge if it is the best approach for the business, but sure as hell I don't like this approach as a user.
- ttul 14y agoGuys, this all doesn't parse for me. My password on LinkedIn was 13 characters long, and included symbols (!@#$%^&&*()), numbers, and alphabet characters. A 13-character password like this would imply a search space of (26 + 26 + 10 + 20) ^ 13 = BIG. If a GPU can check 11 billion passwords per second, this implies that someone ran 2.4 x 10^7 GPUs for a month. We're either looking at someone with a seriously ridiculous password cracking computer (i.e. ASIC-based -- not even FPGAs), a compromise for SHA-1 (very unlikely), or a keylogger/proxy/trojan/etc... I vote for keylogger. If your password is in this database, I don't think it's because your password was brute-forced.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- johnvey 14y agoI cross-referenced the leaked hashes against hashes of the 10,000 most common passwords and found that 93% of the passwords at least 6 characters long appear in the leak. http://www.johnvey.com/blog/2012/06/93-of-top-passwords-appear-in-linkedin-leak http://www.johnvey.com/blog/2012/06/93-of-top-passwords-appe... It's always surprising that people are so lackadaisical about their passwords. I've had people tell me their passwords in casual conversation multiple times, just for the sake of discussion.
- joninashby 14y agoI deleted my account over 6 months ago but my password hash (strong unique password) is in the file. Either (a) the file retains passwords of deleted accounts, (b) the file was stolen over 6 months ago and LinkedIn didn't know about it, or (c) the file was stolen over 6 months ago and LinkedIn DID know about it and were hoping it wouldn't show up online.
- jpgouigoux 14y agoA salt may not have been enough to protect the passwords : if it is not complex enough, the presence of common passwords like "password" or "123456" make a brute-force attack on the salt itself possible in some case. I have performed a benchmark on that point in particular, and was able to retrieve a salt in five days, without strong optimization. A bit long to give all the numbers and code here, so the ref is http://gouigoux.com/blog/?p=46 http://gouigoux.com/blog/?p=46