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Change your Last.fm password
- tptacek 14y ago17.3 MILLION MD5 hashes (unsalted, not that it matters), of which over 16 million have already been cracked.
- jgrahamc 14y agoSays who? Not that I don't believe you. EDIT: The developer who apparently implemented the password hashing replied to me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/russss/status/210783976879693824 https://twitter.com/russss/status/210783976879693824
- raverbashing 14y agoWhat?! This means next leak will be one million CRC32 password hashes? Or maybe LM hashes. Or crypt on old /etc/password files
- tptacek 14y agoThis was funny, and I laughed, but the irony is that old Unix crypt(3) is probably better than MD5 or SHA1.
- jgrahamc 14y agoWell, the Gawker hack was DES IIRC.
- lanstein 14y agoROT13?
- DrCatbox 14y agoIve seen a legacy application still in use which puts the password in a (non-secure) cookie as ROT13 and cleartext in the db.
- SourPatch 14y agoDon't forget last year around this time when Sony's PSN was cracked into and it turned out they were storing the cleartext passwords.
- hpaavola 14y agoPasswords need to die. There will always be bad implementations on storing passwords and those will hurt many users. We need something better.
- quesera 14y agoWell, the problem here is that big corps are doing obviously-wrong things with user data. It's not like there's any uncertainty in the industry about how to do things correctly, it's just that these corps and many others are deciding not to. What makes you think they would make better decisions if the technology was called something other than "passwords"? There is no technology that cannot be ruined by ignorant implementation. Passwords suck for other reasons. This is a poor example.
- jackalope 14y agoLet me tell you a secret. Now that I've told you, it's no longer a secret. That's the problem with passwords.
- ihatecats 14y ago> Well, the problem here is that big corps are doing obviously-wrong things with user data Totally true. One service of a rather large European bank stores passwords in plain text. It's just waiting to be exploited.
- pnathan 14y agoI would like to see pub/private key implementations for this sort of thing.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoI find it so odd that this functionality wasn't baked into web browsers from the beginning.
- 7952 14y ago
- 0x0 14y agoDo LinkedIn, eHarmony and LastFM have any parts of their software stack in common? Same 0day?
- ig1 14y agoThey're all Hadoop users.
- timdorr 14y agoI doubt their Hadoop clusters have password data stored in them.
- jen_h 14y agoIt would be very foolish, but I do wonder if they used Hadoop to compare their hashes with publicly exposed hashes after breaches of other sites (for example, Gawker or Zappos) in order to force reset affected users.
- benpbenp 14y agoOr perhaps some eHarmony and LastFM employees used sensitive passwords for their LinkedIn accounts.
- ch0wn 14y agoMore probably the same mindset regarding security. I wouldn't expect a company that stores unsalted passwords to invest much in security elsewhere.
- toyg 14y agoApparently this breach is a year old, so nothing to do with it. Maybe they just decided to go public today hoping that focus would remain on LNKD or (even better) people would just think "ah well, it can happen to everybody".
- ronnoch 14y agoI was worried for a minute, but I can't actually think of anything a hacker could do with my last.fm account that I care about.
- jasonkester 14y agoLast.fm sounds like the canonical example of a site that where it makes absolutely no difference if your password gets exposed. Worst case, some malicious individual on the internet will learn that I still like the Beastie Boys, even though it's not 1994 anymore. And possibly they'll listen to music in my name. This is why one has a throwaway password. For throwaway accounts at throwaway sites like this. Getting your throwaway password thrown away should by definition not be something you worry about.
- pimeys 14y agoThey'll get your username, they might crack your password. Do you use the same password/username combination somewhere else? If not, good for you. You're kind of a rare person.
- chc 14y agoEven if you don't use the same username, if they have your email, those are fungible with usernames on many sites. (And of course game over if you use the same or similar password for Last.fm and email.)
- praxulus 14y agoI reuse passwords for websites like that, but the other places I use it are similarly throwaway.
- jasonkester 14y agoYes. That's the point. Not only will they be able to listen to music that I like, they might be able to download MySQL as though they were me or comment on Engadget articles as me. None of which are particularly concerning. Because those are throwaway accounts for me.
- bigiain 14y agoMake sure you've got a process in place to at least semi-regularly audit your list of "throwaway accounts". A long time ago, I signed up to PerkMonks for some unimportant reason. Since it was unimportant then (and still is now) I used my then-standard "throwaway login". Sometime later, and before it became "a thing", I signed up for this new "microblgging service" using my "throwaway login" - it was called Twitter - nobody much had heard of it back then. Fastforward 3 years or so… Twitter had become, while not _important_, at least a place where I consider my personal reputation is important. Shortly after the PerkMonks user database got exposed (with it's cleartext passwords! facepalm!), I got an early morning text message from a friend "Acai berry spam from your Twitter account! Ha ha!" (Thanks Colin… For both the heads-up and the deserved ridicule) If you're using the same "throwaway" credentials in a bunch of places you consider "unimportant" - make sure you upgrade those to properly secure credentials when the importance of those places changes. Or better still, get 1Password/KeyPass/LastPass/WhatEver and stop doing that…
- georgespencer 14y agoDoes anyone have a dump of the hashes?
- StavrosK 14y agoI saw this in another thread today, and I am never NOT using it again: http://supergenpass.com/ http://supergenpass.com/
- soulclap 14y agoTo be 'fair': when Last.fm first launched, md5 was probably 'state of the art'. I mean take a step back, they have been around for like forever. The question is: How would you go on about moving your user database from md5 to a more advanced algorithm? Validate a user's password on log-in and then encrypt it with the new, more secure algorithm?
- cschmidt 14y agoYes, that's exactly what you do. In Django 1.4 (the latest), they store passwords using PDKDF2 or bcrypt. The nice thing is that it automatically upgrades the hash function if it used to be something else: _______ Password upgrading When users log in, if their passwords are stored with anything other than the preferred algorithm, Django will automatically upgrade the algorithm to the preferred one. This means that old installs of Django will get automatically more secure as users log in, and it also means that you can switch to new (and better) storage algorithms as they get invented. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#password-upgrading https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#password-... _________ So it would be trivial for the big sites to have switched transparently to a safer hash, even if MD5 was Ok when they started. You could also add salts in the same way, if you were storing unsalted hashes.
- raverbashing 14y agoKudos to Django because this is very important Like in bcrypt discussion saying you can tune the amount of work. Sure, but what to do with the existing hashes! Of course, the user needs to retype their keys, but it's better than keeping old credentials. (or maybe you save the original credentials with strong PK crypto, together with the hash, then periodically decrypt offline and rehash)
- powersurge360 14y agoIn regards to "what to do with the existing hashes" bcrypt can detect the original work factor and hash to that. Not sure how you would upgrade that for users, however.
- anigbrowl 14y agoJeepers, I just changed my linked in password. I had the source for PGP back in 1993, I don't recycle passwords for anything remotely important, I use gnarly long passphrases, two factor authentication and what-all else, and I AM SICK OF IT. I'm beginning to think that IBM had the right idea witht he thumbprint scanners in the laptops. I'm tired of the maintenance security imposes on me, the lack of a meaningful industry certification, and on developers' insistence that I use passwords of between X and Y length and containing particular combinations of characters, numbers, etc. Every time I read about one of these avoidable breaches, I feel tempted to gin up a class action lawsuit and force a company to either write a painfully large check to acknowledge the time and trouble it has imposed on its customers - say, about $5 each - or sell itself to its users in lieu of money. I'm not actually going to go to that effort, but sooner or later some enterprising law firm will, and I'm sure everyone here is going to be all hand-wringy about it. We need to automate security and make it customer-centric. It is plainly too complicated to be left to individual web service providers, just as brick-and-mortar stores do not manufacture their own door locks or burglar alarms. Vendors, if you feel you can't safely outsource this job to a third party, then you need to hire full-time security monitors and start facing up to security as a line-item cost rather than a check-box you can forget about after you've put it in place. Sorry to be ranty, but when established firms are losing millions upon millions of passwords literally on a daily basis, something is drastically wrong with the state of the art. This is a problem that can't be prettied away with CSS or smoothed over with a few tweets and blog posts.
- sliverstorm 14y agoI'm beginning to think that IBM had the right idea witht he thumbprint scanners in the laptops. Fundamental flaw with that- you can't change your fingerprint if/when it is compromised.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoOn the other hand, it's much harder to crack a hashed thumprint image. [edit] evan_ is right, you don't hash scan images. The question is, how much usable bits of entropy you can extract from a thumbprint scan? Anyway, I retract my main point.
- stuartmemo 14y agoDelete my Last.fm account I think they mean.
- jameswyse 14y ago@CrackMeIfYouCan posted this on twitter: A bit of stats on last.fm leak: 1) It happened a WHILE ago. 2010/2011 2) 17.3 million raw-md5 3) 16.4 million cracked. 95% cracked.
- drostie 14y agoNice to hear. I had thought that perhaps one of their higher-ups had used the same pass on LinkedIn as on Last.fm and had noticed suspicious activity. Now I know that they just googled to see, "oh, did anyone hack us? they did?! OVER A YEAR AGO?!"
- kalininalex 14y agoAny info on how and why so many were cracked? Passwords too simple?
- darklajid 14y agoMD5, unsalted. On commodity hardware you can compute those blazingly fast. A brute force attack, ignoring word lists, is totally possible. That's ignoring all the resources that offer access to precomputed hashes (I don't want to call a list of MD5 hashes a rainbow table). Easy or not, passwords saved with this scheme are unprotected.
- phase_9 14y agoUnsalted MD5s. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/speed-hashing.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/speed-hashing.html
- toyg 14y agoWTF, A YEAR AGO ?? They didn't notify users (i.e. me). Aren't they in breach of California law? Where are they based?
- evan_ 14y agomaybe they're just learning about it
- majke 14y agoAnd WizzAir keeps passwords in plain text. What can be done to shame them?
- reidrac 14y agoLast.fm Password Security Update http://www.last.fm/passwordsecurity http://www.last.fm/passwordsecurity
- jgrahamc 14y agoIs there a cryptanalytic reason why a company that has a database full of MD5/SHA1 hashes can't perform a one time upgrade by computing bcrypt(salt, the_old_hash) for every hash they have in the database and then when someone logs in do bcrypt(salt, md5/sha1(password)) to check the password?
- jedbrown 14y agoIt looks like that is what LinkedIn claims to have done. http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/06/linkedin-member-passwords-compromised/ http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/06/linkedin-member-password...
- joelthelion 14y agoper-user salt.
- hinathan 14y agoThat's a perfectly reasonable approach — we did that at PBworks a long time ago. Totally transparent to users if done right. You can also declare password bankruptcy and zero out everything. That forces password resets for your entire user base. The latter approach doesn't go over so well with users or support staff but it is much simpler.
- dunk010 14y agoThe auth.getMobileSession method in the 2.0 API, and the scrobble 1.0 API were both sticking points.
- tthomas48 14y agoWouldn't I want to keep my last.fm password static lest they leak my new password?
- guelo 14y agoHere's the method I use to manage website passwords: For logins that I don't really care about that much, say last.fm, I use my standard medium-strength 6 character password with a number and a capital letter, something like jfi3Jo. I can remember it because I use it often. For logins that I do care about like my email or bank I salt my base password by inserting three characters from the site's domain name into the front, middle and end of the base password. For example, my login to Hacker News would be yjfic3Joo, where yco from ycombinator.com is added in the front middle and end of the base password. I know it's not the most secure method in the world but I think it is a good compromise between remembering the passwords and providing a unique-per-site decent strength 9 character password. If someone figured out my scheme they could get into all my accounts but in order to figure out my scheme they would have to brute force crack two of my 9 character passwords from hashes from two different sites and then match up the two accounts and compare the differences, that is the risk I currently take.
- nadinengland 14y agoI wrote a large paragraph on now I do my passwords then realised how silly it is to tell the world :D
- adambyrtek 14y agoNews of this kind make me even more glad that I use random generated passwords for every site, with LastPass to manage all of that. (Waiting for a snarky comment about LastPass being supposedly hacked some time ago.)
- sohn 14y agohttp://pastebin.com/JVVNvVT2 http://pastebin.com/JVVNvVT2 THis is part of it. And yes they are plain passwords. ANd yes, some of them are very hard to crack, so they weren't cracked. They were PLAIN
- jyap 14y agoI just changed my password and deleted my Last.fm account. Just because I changed my password doesn't mean a new MD5 hash of my new password won't leak tomorrow. If you can't trust the service, don't use the service. To delete your Last.fm account, go to the "Data" tab in settings. Click on "Delete entire account for user".
- smsm42 14y agoLooks like passwords need to be replaced with something else, obviously most companies, excluding none, are completely unable to handle them properly. Time for a big disruption.
- ricardobeat 14y agoI doubt my new password will be any safer, so I can't really use one which follows my current pseudo-random patterns. I'm now convinced that password managers, with random generated passwords, are the way to go. At least they have a strong incentive to focus on protecting user data. Still scared of not knowing my own passwords, and giving them to a third party, though.
- Arelius 14y agoAgreed, I would never trust my passwords to a private third-party with closed code-base. And KeePass still seems a little meh, especially regarding device support. So for now I'm using an encrypted file synced with DropBox.
- tosh 14y agoHoly cow. Apparently reporting the vulnerability to them 5(!) years ago was not enough :/ http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=139497 http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=139497 * Communicate over SSL/TLS (avoids session hijacking scenarios and is a reasonable choice in general) * Hash AND Salt user passwords (we use PBKDF2) Take one day and fix this in your own products & you just saved yourself a major PR disaster in the future :)
- gioele 14y agoIt is OK to suggest users to change their passwords, but shouldn't they stop sending their session cookies over plain HTTP? Session hijacking is now widespread and an easy way to get into non-important accounts and then escalate to more interesting accounts. [1] https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Session_hijacking_attack https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Session_hijacking_attack PS: I'm leaving this comment without any reference to the site name, so I can copy and paste it verbatim in the future; it looks like this kind of breaches will not stop soon.
- nitrogen 14y agoPS: I'm leaving this comment without any reference to the site name, so I can copy and paste it verbatim in the future; it looks like this kind of breaches will not stop soon. Be aware that there is the possibility[0] that HN's (or other sites') anti-spam features may detect a copy-pasted post as duplicate or artificial content, and kill it and/or your account. It's probably better to add a link to the original post, with some article-specific text. [0] Based on speculation and inference, not actual knowledge.
- sunwatcher 14y agoThere's a great deal of room for improvement in password protection, which would make stealing a password very difficult. Some discussion on developments in that front here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047968 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047968