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Stop Hacklore – An Open Letter

112 points by zdw 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago
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MerrimanInd 11mo ago
I worked for a company that had 8-12 different employee passwords across various systems. There was no SSO, they each password had different requirements, and required changes at different intervals ranging from 30-90 days. Consequently every employee had a post-it note directly on the laptop with most or all of their passwords. The outdated IT policy security was so strict that real world security was abysmal.
hullfracture 11mo ago
This has the energy of "Remove all DEI initiatives because we have solved workplace discrimination." > This kind of advice is well-intentioned but misleading. It consumes the limited time people have to protect themselves and diverts attention from actions that truly reduce the likelihood and impact of real compromises. I dislike any methodology that claims its intent is to talk down to people for whatever declared reasoning. People are capable, and should be helped to make decisions based on all available information. > Regularly change passwords: Frequent password changes were once common advice, but there is no evidence it reduces crime, and it often leads to weaker passwords and reuse across accounts. When I worked as a security professional the breaches were nearly always from someone's password getting leaked in a separate public breach. If those individuals had changed that password the in house breach would have been avoided. > Use a password manager Sage advice.
- josephcsible 11mo ago
  > > Regularly change passwords: Frequent password changes were once common advice, but there is no evidence it reduces crime, and it often leads to weaker passwords and reuse across accounts. > When I worked as a security professional the breaches were nearly always from someone's password getting leaked in a separate public breach. If those individuals had changed that password the in house breach would have been avoided. You completely missed the point. The good advice is to not reuse passwords. That alone would have stopped the in house breach.
- NegativeK 11mo ago
  > People are capable, and should be helped to make decisions based on all available information. To relay a quote, with the source not being very important: "I'm not going to waste a dime on cybersecurity when my officers need bullets and armor." People can be intelligent and capable and have minimal (if you're lucky) bandwidth or tolerance for cybersecurity advice. It's not the crisis they see every day. The advice given to unwilling listeners has to be focused and prioritized. And... Password leaks and therefore rotations aren't an issue if people are using a strong main password for their manager. Then a leak doesn't transfer to another account and the manager will loudly tell them when a password is found in breach data -- which lines up with NIST's modern advice of avoiding password complexity and rotation, since they've found it to lead to minimal (at best) gained security.
Kim_Bruning 11mo ago
I think even the 'new' recommendations here are getting a bit old.
voodooEntity 11mo ago
So, since this seems to be relevant im a CISO myself. And i would definitely not agree with everything in this letter. Personally, i think the worst part about it is handling a low probability as something that's not gonne happen. Thats, especially in IT-Sec, one of the worst practices. To take on point as example - the "never scan public QR codes". Apart from the fact that there have been enaugh exploits in the past (The USSD "Remote Wipe", iOS 11 Camera Notification Spoofing (iOS, 2018), ZBar Buffer Overflow (CVE-2023-40889), etc) even without an 0day exploit qr codes can pose a relevant risk. As a simple example, not to long ago i was in a restaurant which only had their menu in form of a qr code to scan. Behind the QR code was the link to an PDF showing the menu. This PDF was hosted on a free to use webservice that allowed to upload files and get a QR code link to them. There was no account managed control about the pdf that they linked to, it could be replaced at any time opening a whole different world of possible exploitations via whatever file is being returned. Sure you could argue "this is not a QR code vulnerability just bad practice by the restaurant owner" - but that's the point. For the user there is literally no difference if the QR code itself has a malicious payload or if the URL behind it has (etc etc). While we in the tech world might understand the difference, for the John and Jane Doe this is the same thing. And for them its still a possible danger. Apart from that, recently a coworker linked me a "hacker" video on youtube showing a guy in an interview talking about the O.MG cable. Sure, you might say this is also an absolutely non standard attack vector, yet it still exists. And people should be aware it does. My point is - by telling people that all those attack vectors are basically "urban myths" you just desensitize the already not well enough informed public from the dangers the "digital" poses to them. And from my personal view, we should rather educate more than tell them "don't worry it will be fine".
- tptacek 11mo ago
  The article doesn't claim that things like O.MG don't exist, just that they're not a serious threat to modern devices. It's explicit on that point.
  - voodooEntity 11mo ago
    Well i just listed the O.MG cable to show that there are alot of people not knowing that such things exist. My point is that of : people should be better informed about what vectors of attacks exist. So mentioning the cable (in relation to a coworker coming to my desk and asking about it) was just an example of how informed average Joe/Jane are and that i think this is the more important part - educate the public not just tell them not to worry.
diath 11mo ago
> Never scan QR codes: There is no evidence of widespread crime originating from QR-code scanning itself. > The true risk is social engineering scams... Exactly. My grandma is very susceptible to phishing and social engineering, I don't want her scanning random QR codes that would lead to almost identical service to the one she would think she is on and end up with identity theft or the likes. > Regularly change passwords: Frequent password changes were once common advice, but there is no evidence it reduces crime, and it often leads to weaker passwords and reuse across accounts. Database leaks happen all the time.
- InsideOutSanta 11mo ago
  If databases contain your password, you have a problem that regular password changes won't fix.
- nicce 11mo ago
  > Database leaks happen all the time The point is to use unique passwords. If there is a leak, hopefully it is detected and then it is appropriate to change the password.
  - TZubiri 11mo ago
    Sure, if you use unique passwords, then changing passwords isn't as useful. Yet we shouldn't judge a security policy based on the existence or not of another policies. What you are judging then is a whole set of policies, which is a bit too controlling, you will most often not have absolute control over the users policy set, all you can do is suggest policies which may or may not be adopted, you can't rely on their strict adoption. A similar case is on the empiric efficacy of birth control. The effectiveness of abstinence based methods is lower than condoms in practice. Whereas theoretically abstinence based birth control would be better, who cares what the rates are in theory? The actual success rates are what matters.
- blauditore 11mo ago
  Forced password changes are one of those security theater exercises that drive me absolutely nuts. It's a huge inconvenience long-term, and drives people to apply tricks (write it on a post-it note, or just keep adding dots, or +1 every time). Plus, if your password gets stolen, there's a good chance most of the damage has already been done by the time you change the password based on a schedule, so any security benefit is only for preventing long-term access by account hijackers.
AlotOfReading 11mo ago
There's the typical mix of good and bad points in this manifesto, but I wish the people willing to sign their names to it had a better record of success implementing the call to action inside their own organizations first: We call on software manufacturers to take responsibility for building software that is secure by design and secure by default—engineered to be safe before it ever reaches users—and to publish clear roadmaps showing how they will achieve that goal.
Animats 11mo ago
Note that most of the signers are from companies which collect substantial consumer information for revenue purposes. Hence the emphasis on "updating". And the absence of "turn up browser security levels to max" or "get a good ad blocker". Also, any password manager that's "cloud based" is potentially a security hole. Yeah, they say the server is secure. Right.
- magackame 11mo ago
  > Also, any password manager that's "cloud based" is potentially a security hole. Yeah, they say the server is secure. Right. You think of someone stealing your password vault and cracking AES? The vault is E2EE.
  - 8organicbits 11mo ago
    The LastPass hack is a good example of that happening. Weak master passwords and a smaller number of KDF rounds, made the situation worse. Realistically, most users benefit from using a reputable cloud-based password manager, and should focus on securing it with a strong password and MFA. You should also change your passwords if your password manager is breached. The open letter tries to steer us towards reputable guides, linking to this one by EFF: https://ssd.eff.org/module/choosing-the-password-manager-that-s-right-for-you https://ssd.eff.org/module/choosing-the-password-manager-tha...
  - deleted 11mo ago
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  - bigiain 11mo ago
    Yeah - but where does the code doing the encryption/decryption come from? 1Password serves me the Javascript that encrypts/decrypts my vault every time I open my work 1PW webapp. It's not reasonable to assume their server is "secure" not just from evil-hakzors and script kiddies, but also from government agencies with things like Technical Capability Notices and secret FISA warrants and NSLs with gag orders (or whatever their jurisdictional equivalents are), and also from threats like offensive cybersecurity firms with clients like disgruntled royalty in nepotistic moncharcy nations states who send bonesaw murder teams after dissident journalists. I (mostly) trust AES (assuming it's properly implemented, and I exclude the NSA from that, and the equivalent agencies in at least a handful of other major nation states). I have a lot less trust in owners and executives at my password vault vendor or their cloud hosting company or their software supply chain. If I were them, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to stick up for my users the way Ladar Levison and Lavabit did. There's no doubt that the right federal agency could apply enough pressure on me and my family/friends to make me give up all my users unencrypted vaults. Sorry, but true.
digdigdag 11mo ago
None of my opinions of this manifesto are positive. This is a defeatist position. It dangerously conditions people to be more casual about their privacy and safety. There are still legitimate reasons to clear cookies, to turn off Bluetooth/NFC beaconing, and to occasionally rotate passwords (vis a vis password managers) as it costs nothing to accomplish, and very little in the way of tradeoffs. So...why not? The probability of a random individual being the target of a sophisticated state sponsored attack is low, but the probability of being caught up in a larger dragnet and for data to be classified, aggregated and profiled is very high. So why not make it just a bit harder for them all? If anything, let's chip away at this problem bit by bit. Make their life a bit harder...their datacenters a bit hotter. Add random fud to the cookie values, constantly switch VPN endpoints, randomize your mac address on every WiFi association, constantly delete old comments, accounts, create throwaway accounts, create proxies and intermediaries, rotate your password and 2FA -- use any legal means to frustrate any adversarial entities -- commercial or otherwise. They want information? They want your data? Fine, overwhelm them with it. THAT should be the proper modern privacy-focused manifesto. This is utterly bewildering... ...but then I get to the signatories and this nonsense suddenly made all the sense in the world: > Sincerely, Heather Adkins, VP, Cybersecurity Resilience Officer, Google > Aimee Cardwell, former CISO UnitedHealthGroup > Curt Dukes, former NSA IA Director, and Cybersecurity Executive > Tony Sager, former NSA Executive > Ben Adida, VotingWorks > Geoff Belknap, Deputy CISO, Microsoft The corporate CISO club is behind this.
torben-friis 11mo ago
I might be alone in this, but I feel the advice regarding 2FA and password managers is putting people into risk. My mom using those would be one “I don’t know where I put that” away from permanently losing access to her pictures or any other similar access. This is as potentially harmful as any attack.
- fragmede 11mo ago
  Fwiw, Apple has a notion of a recovery contact, someone else who can get you back into your account.
emidln 11mo ago
I'm not a CISO just a random dog on the internet, but this open letter seems to assume that privacy is not a part of your security posture and that spear phishing isn't common these days. (Is 'spear phishing' still the term for targeted electronic scams to steal credentials/access?) I realize not everyone is using a physically stripped burner, a graphene os install, etc and not everyone works at a high value financial, govt, or infra target but for those of us who need to deal with opsec or are commonly targeted by spear phishing this advice seems abysmal. In the current political climate of the US, if you are living or traveling here and the current party isn't cheering for you personally, you really should be considering both state-sponsored attacks and no longer have the luxury of assuming good faith by the state. Telling people to enable cheap drive by attacks that are in active use by certain government agencies is irresponsible malpractice at best and actively evil at worst. Source: I've worked at analytics companies that actively deanonymized users using cookies when available. We used wifi and Bluetooth details when available. We built "multi channel marketing" which was just taking any information we could scrape from the user to fingerprint them and cross reference and deanonymize them so we could sell interactions to businesses like geofenced price discrimination, value of users, and could offer cross website information on shopping habits/financial profile. The shit I did 15 years ago didn't go away and no matter how much I wish I didn't write that, it was the tip of the iceberg and relatively benign.
- tptacek 11mo ago
  The piece is explicitly about retiring outdated security advice and doesn't claim to provide a complete, coherent defensive posture (that posture would have to depend on who you are and what your threat model is!). I don't like that they included the "recommendations for the public" section, but I don't think there's a reasonable way to read it as intending to be a complete action plan.
croes 11mo ago
Some of outdated advices are rarely a threat just because people follow the advice.
pityJuke 11mo ago
QR Code scams are a very real issue [0]. [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr430eee2w5o.amp https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr430eee2w5o.amp
- johncoatesdev 11mo ago
  Yes, but the advice shouldn't be "Never scan QR codes", it's more like: "be aware of dodgy QR codes by looking at the context in which it's placed".
ropetin 11mo ago
I find it interesting that the comment about VPNs offering little additional privacy or security benefits is wrapped up under 'Avoid Public WiFi' rather than being called out explicitly. It drives me nuts all the ads I see for NordVPN or whatever claiming that by using their services you are now totally safe from all the hacks. If anything, it makes the median user less safe because they have a false sense of security.
- blauditore 11mo ago
  NordVPN is also one of the worst offenders in borderline marketing campaigns. Really questionable company.
yearolinuxdsktp 11mo ago
You can only avoid rotation on passwords that are MFA-protected. If you implement a password manager, you must mandate auto-fill only and actively discourage (via training) copy/paste of credentials to a web site. Train the users to view “auto-fill not working” as a red flag. (This doesn’t apply to non-website credentials). Mandate all passwords to be auto-generated. Mandate that the only manually-entered password is the one for the password manager. Of course, you must have MFA on the password manager entry. This will allow your users to comply with frequent password rotations much more easily. Auto-fill requirement/culture is critical to reducing phishing success, especially for tired eyes.
HiPhish 11mo ago
I have two more to add to the list: > Secret questions No, my mother's maiden name is not a secret. And some questions like "who was your best friend in elementary school?" might have different answers depending on when you ask me. Plus, unless my best friend's name was Jose Pawel Mustafa Mungabi de la Svenson-Kurosawaskiwitz (we used to call him Joe) it's pretty easy to guess with a dictionary attack. The only way to answer these questions securely is to make up an answer that's impossible to guess, which results in a second password. > You password must contain these particular characters I understand that this rule is to prevent people from using passwords like "kittycat", but "k!ttyc4T" is still less secure than "horse battery staple correct".
- card_zero 11mo ago
  I remember that a not-so-recent investigation recommended five words. (Also you got the order wrong, "correct" was at the front, but you'd probably get it right second try, so the concept is still good.)
- Waterluvian 11mo ago
  > Jose Pawel Mustafa Mungabi de la Svenson-Kurosawaskiwitz How in the #%*^ did you figure out my secret question? I absolutely hate security theatre. And these kinds of things are just that. In fact, I’m sure that difficult to remember passwords make us less secure as we forget or write them down.
- thayne 11mo ago
  > "kittycat", but "k!ttyc4T" is still less secure than "horse battery staple correct". Well... something like that. Please don't use exactly "horse battery staple correct".
  - card_zero 11mo ago
    Oh, that was probably the point, that it's very weak but still better than k!ttyc4T. We both got downvoted for not picking up that implication. This thread requires too much mind-reading for me.
  - 11mo ago
thomastjeffery 11mo ago
Don't worry about cookies or bother using a VPN, because... you are being tracked anyway? What's the point of including such a defeatist stance? > the real world across industry, academia, and government. Gotcha, so no one here gives a shit about privacy. They only care about avoiding the inconveniences of fraud and leaked secrets. Use a password manager and a feature-complete adblocker (ublock origin on Firefox). Send messages over end-to-end encrypted channels. Use a VPN along with your adblocker and some kind of cookie/browser-id isolation if you don't want your traffic stalked.
- golem14 11mo ago
  BTW, I really would like to have a way to partially clear cookies – i.e., I don't want to be signed out of gmail, and maybe not out of the Mechanic's Bank of Alaska or Amazon or Netflix, but most other things could go. I don't think this is easy in Chrome, Safari or other mainstream browsers, is it? Yesyes, I do know that Big Ad can mostly stitch together some proxy profile of me anyway, but it would be more blurry.
  - thomastjeffery 11mo ago
    Firefox has a great feature for this: multi-account containers. The UI is trash, but it's usable.
  - dolmen 11mo ago
    Just use a separate browser profile for your critical accounts.
    - golem14 11mo ago
      Doesn’t this leak info when clicking on a link in say gmail opening that link in another profile? Most URL’s have pretty long extra strings in them that I assume are just cookie-equivalent?
drtgh 11mo ago
That open letter is filled with malice, so I can only guess that it's either trolling or a bad taste joke (due people could think are outdated recommendations and spread, lets remember the flat-earth thing).
- f_devd 11mo ago
  Where do you detect malice? The claims are quite accurate.
  - drtgh 11mo ago
    Accurate? Lets take the Wifi (Other users already commented the other ones). Open a wifi access point with the name of the restaurant, intercept the DNS requests and serve your filtered stuff. PS: If the text is real and not trolling, the keyword in the text is 'rarely happen', which we could apply to car seatbelts then.
    - jrjfjgkrj 11mo ago
      what filtered stuff? you mean partial web pages? most browsers use DNS over HTTPS
    - johncoatesdev 11mo ago
      And how exactly do you plan to forge the SSL certificates to deliver your filtered contents?
    - quesera 11mo ago
      > intercept the DNS requests and serve your filtered stuff. How do you get from a malicious DNS response to a browser-validated TLS cert for the requested host?
    - 8organicbits 11mo ago
      Then what? The user presumably sees TLS certificate warnings since you don't have valid certicates. HSTS would prevent downgrades to plain HTTP and is pretty common on sensitive websites. Isn't the better advice to avoid clicking through certificate warnings? That applies both on and off open wifi networks. There is a privacy concern, as DNS queries would leak. Enabling strict DoH helps (which is not the default browser setting).
ralph84 11mo ago
How about these: - CISOs aren’t actually officers of the company and are typically 2-3 levels below the actual officers - CISOs only exist to have someone to deflect blame onto after the inevitable breach - If a company actually cared about security they wouldn’t put it in a silo
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TZubiri 11mo ago
Knowing what rules not to follow and what isn't a risk is important to know where to invest energy. Tech and non tech users have a budget to spend on IT Sec, so if you impose a lot of useless or marginally useful rituals along with the useful prophylaxis, the user will be forced to drop some of the measures, so it's better to drop some rules early on by policy rather than letting users decide what good practices to avoid.
peanut-walrus 11mo ago
For 1, you can still have extremely malicious networks. It's true that your web traffic is likely encrypted but... What services are exposed on your machine? Do you have mapped samba shares? For 5 - session cookies are one of the main things stealers look for. Deleting cookies is absolutely good advice until browsers build in better mitigations against cookie theft. For 6 - if there was a standard interface how password managers could rotate my creds, I would sure as hell use it. Force rotating passwords is only "bad" if people need to remember them. Any random credentials stored in a vault absolutely should be rotated periodically, there is no reason not to. I don't see the point of this letter, none of the "bad" advice they call out is harmful to security in any way, if people feel safer avoiding public wifi, so be it. Is it just a call out to other cisos to update their security hygiene powerpoints?
- NegativeK 11mo ago
  While you and I would love it if password managers would rotate creds, we're not yet at the point where people will use password managers. They're still using CompanynameFall2025!. Next month, they'll dutifully rotate their password to CompanynameWinter2025! because their work policy is still stuck on shitty standards. > This kind of advice is well-intentioned but misleading. It consumes the limited time people have to protect themselves and diverts attention from actions that truly reduce the likelihood and impact of real compromises. When you've got 15 seconds to _maybe_ get someone to change their behavior for the better, you need to discard everything that's not essential and stay very very far away from "yes, but" in your explanations.
villiage 11mo ago
I don’t understand why people promote password managers for individuals. You don’t need to store your password in a central location that is a prime target to hackers; even if it’s encrypted, that’s more of a risk than keeping one of your own. And some of the previous advice they’re stepping back from like avoiding QR codes you’re unfamiliar with is still good advice; you should be careful and not expose yourself too much.
- NegativeK 11mo ago
  1. People are terrible at creating strong passwords. People will NOT create hundreds of strong passwords. 2. People will not use complex solutions unless actively and rigidly enforced. 3. At best, we can hope that they can create one really good passphrase. That's combined with MFA. There are people that are exceptions to those, but they're vanishingly small percentage of the population. And unfortunately, there are a way, way more people that think they have something better but are deluding themselves -- like bad card counters that casinos are happy to have at the blackjack table or non-experts rolling their own crypto.
exabrial 11mo ago
> Use SMS one-time codes as a last resort Let me fix this for you: > Never use SMS one-time codes as a last resort
BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
Slight tangent: My wife's place of work has recently instituted a minimum 16-character password rule with the standard complexity requirements. They also encourage the use of password management software, as well as enforcing password changes every 6 months. Where I see a flaw in this is the initial login. If you're not already on your computer to access the password manager, how do you retrieve the essentially non-memorisable password to unlock your computer in order to get to the password manager to retrieve the essentially non-memorisable password? The password to unlock the computer, therefore, must be able to be remembered. This pretty much excludes 16-character auto-generated passwords for anyone but a savant. Am I missing something obvious here? (MFA using an authenticator app on the phone? Is that something that Windows / Mac/ Linux supports?)
- wordpad 11mo ago
  I've not met anyone who doesn't just increment a digit at the end every 6 months. And any password length requirement beyond 8 always ends up being just a logical extension of 8 character password (like putting 1234 at the end), if 16 characters is required one would just type their standard password in twice. If a any of the old passwords (potentially from unrelated applications) get leaked, it's almost trivial to guess current password.
  - BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
    Yeah, that's kinda my point, increasing the complexity requirements counter-intuitively reduces, or at least doesn't change, the actual level of security provided. It's a wetware limitation. Not that we don't have methods that could improve it, it's just that they're not yet implemented at this specific point of contact. Interestingly.
Taek 11mo ago
I don't really like the name. When you say 'Hacklore' I think of the hackers at MIT and such. That stuff is really cool and shouldn't be stopped or suppressed! But the message, absolutely on board with it.
dadrian 11mo ago
This is good advice, and there's good people on the signature list, but why is this is an open letter? This feels navel-gazey and straight out of 2017.
donald6 11mo ago
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donald6 11mo ago
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splintersio 11mo ago
What Bob and the signatories fail to recognise is that they're attempting to swap out nuanced advice for foundational advice and they're patting themselves on the back for it, actually. that foundational advice has always been the nuanced advice is for unsolved problems, so ... if you ask a nuanced question, you'll be ... directed back to foundational security advice ? I don't think they've thought about it, perhaps Signatories shouldn't play risk-advice cosplay at population levels. I'd be annoyed if this influenced policy because of who they are and not how dumb the logic is.

112 points by zdw 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

I worked for a company that had 8-12 different employee passwords across various systems. There was no SSO, they each password had different requirements, and required changes at different intervals ranging from 30-90 days. Consequently every employee had a post-it note directly on the laptop with most or all of their passwords. The outdated IT policy security was so strict that real world security was abysmal.

hullfracture 11mo ago

This has the energy of "Remove all DEI initiatives because we have solved workplace discrimination." > This kind of advice is well-intentioned but misleading. It consumes the limited time people have to protect themselves and diverts attention from actions that truly reduce the likelihood and impact of real compromises. I dislike any methodology that claims its intent is to talk down to people for whatever declared reasoning. People are capable, and should be helped to make decisions based on all available information. > Regularly change passwords: Frequent password changes were once common advice, but there is no evidence it reduces crime, and it often leads to weaker passwords and reuse across accounts. When I worked as a security professional the breaches were nearly always from someone's password getting leaked in a separate public breach. If those individuals had changed that password the in house breach would have been avoided. > Use a password manager Sage advice.

josephcsible 11mo ago
> > Regularly change passwords: Frequent password changes were once common advice, but there is no evidence it reduces crime, and it often leads to weaker passwords and reuse across accounts. > When I worked as a security professional the breaches were nearly always from someone's password getting leaked in a separate public breach. If those individuals had changed that password the in house breach would have been avoided. You completely missed the point. The good advice is to not reuse passwords. That alone would have stopped the in house breach.
NegativeK 11mo ago
> People are capable, and should be helped to make decisions based on all available information. To relay a quote, with the source not being very important: "I'm not going to waste a dime on cybersecurity when my officers need bullets and armor." People can be intelligent and capable and have minimal (if you're lucky) bandwidth or tolerance for cybersecurity advice. It's not the crisis they see every day. The advice given to unwilling listeners has to be focused and prioritized. And... Password leaks and therefore rotations aren't an issue if people are using a strong main password for their manager. Then a leak doesn't transfer to another account and the manager will loudly tell them when a password is found in breach data -- which lines up with NIST's modern advice of avoiding password complexity and rotation, since they've found it to lead to minimal (at best) gained security.

Kim_Bruning 11mo ago

I think even the 'new' recommendations here are getting a bit old.

voodooEntity 11mo ago

So, since this seems to be relevant im a CISO myself. And i would definitely not agree with everything in this letter. Personally, i think the worst part about it is handling a low probability as something that's not gonne happen. Thats, especially in IT-Sec, one of the worst practices. To take on point as example - the "never scan public QR codes". Apart from the fact that there have been enaugh exploits in the past (The USSD "Remote Wipe", iOS 11 Camera Notification Spoofing (iOS, 2018), ZBar Buffer Overflow (CVE-2023-40889), etc) even without an 0day exploit qr codes can pose a relevant risk. As a simple example, not to long ago i was in a restaurant which only had their menu in form of a qr code to scan. Behind the QR code was the link to an PDF showing the menu. This PDF was hosted on a free to use webservice that allowed to upload files and get a QR code link to them. There was no account managed control about the pdf that they linked to, it could be replaced at any time opening a whole different world of possible exploitations via whatever file is being returned. Sure you could argue "this is not a QR code vulnerability just bad practice by the restaurant owner" - but that's the point. For the user there is literally no difference if the QR code itself has a malicious payload or if the URL behind it has (etc etc). While we in the tech world might understand the difference, for the John and Jane Doe this is the same thing. And for them its still a possible danger. Apart from that, recently a coworker linked me a "hacker" video on youtube showing a guy in an interview talking about the O.MG cable. Sure, you might say this is also an absolutely non standard attack vector, yet it still exists. And people should be aware it does. My point is - by telling people that all those attack vectors are basically "urban myths" you just desensitize the already not well enough informed public from the dangers the "digital" poses to them. And from my personal view, we should rather educate more than tell them "don't worry it will be fine".

tptacek 11mo ago
The article doesn't claim that things like O.MG don't exist, just that they're not a serious threat to modern devices. It's explicit on that point.
- voodooEntity 11mo ago
  Well i just listed the O.MG cable to show that there are alot of people not knowing that such things exist. My point is that of : people should be better informed about what vectors of attacks exist. So mentioning the cable (in relation to a coworker coming to my desk and asking about it) was just an example of how informed average Joe/Jane are and that i think this is the more important part - educate the public not just tell them not to worry.

diath 11mo ago

> Never scan QR codes: There is no evidence of widespread crime originating from QR-code scanning itself. > The true risk is social engineering scams... Exactly. My grandma is very susceptible to phishing and social engineering, I don't want her scanning random QR codes that would lead to almost identical service to the one she would think she is on and end up with identity theft or the likes. > Regularly change passwords: Frequent password changes were once common advice, but there is no evidence it reduces crime, and it often leads to weaker passwords and reuse across accounts. Database leaks happen all the time.

InsideOutSanta 11mo ago
If databases contain your password, you have a problem that regular password changes won't fix.
nicce 11mo ago
> Database leaks happen all the time The point is to use unique passwords. If there is a leak, hopefully it is detected and then it is appropriate to change the password.
- TZubiri 11mo ago
  Sure, if you use unique passwords, then changing passwords isn't as useful. Yet we shouldn't judge a security policy based on the existence or not of another policies. What you are judging then is a whole set of policies, which is a bit too controlling, you will most often not have absolute control over the users policy set, all you can do is suggest policies which may or may not be adopted, you can't rely on their strict adoption. A similar case is on the empiric efficacy of birth control. The effectiveness of abstinence based methods is lower than condoms in practice. Whereas theoretically abstinence based birth control would be better, who cares what the rates are in theory? The actual success rates are what matters.
blauditore 11mo ago
Forced password changes are one of those security theater exercises that drive me absolutely nuts. It's a huge inconvenience long-term, and drives people to apply tricks (write it on a post-it note, or just keep adding dots, or +1 every time). Plus, if your password gets stolen, there's a good chance most of the damage has already been done by the time you change the password based on a schedule, so any security benefit is only for preventing long-term access by account hijackers.

AlotOfReading 11mo ago

There's the typical mix of good and bad points in this manifesto, but I wish the people willing to sign their names to it had a better record of success implementing the call to action inside their own organizations first: We call on software manufacturers to take responsibility for building software that is secure by design and secure by default—engineered to be safe before it ever reaches users—and to publish clear roadmaps showing how they will achieve that goal.

Animats 11mo ago

Note that most of the signers are from companies which collect substantial consumer information for revenue purposes. Hence the emphasis on "updating". And the absence of "turn up browser security levels to max" or "get a good ad blocker". Also, any password manager that's "cloud based" is potentially a security hole. Yeah, they say the server is secure. Right.

magackame 11mo ago
> Also, any password manager that's "cloud based" is potentially a security hole. Yeah, they say the server is secure. Right. You think of someone stealing your password vault and cracking AES? The vault is E2EE.
- 8organicbits 11mo ago
  The LastPass hack is a good example of that happening. Weak master passwords and a smaller number of KDF rounds, made the situation worse. Realistically, most users benefit from using a reputable cloud-based password manager, and should focus on securing it with a strong password and MFA. You should also change your passwords if your password manager is breached. The open letter tries to steer us towards reputable guides, linking to this one by EFF: https://ssd.eff.org/module/choosing-the-password-manager-that-s-right-for-you https://ssd.eff.org/module/choosing-the-password-manager-tha...
- deleted 11mo ago
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- bigiain 11mo ago
  Yeah - but where does the code doing the encryption/decryption come from? 1Password serves me the Javascript that encrypts/decrypts my vault every time I open my work 1PW webapp. It's not reasonable to assume their server is "secure" not just from evil-hakzors and script kiddies, but also from government agencies with things like Technical Capability Notices and secret FISA warrants and NSLs with gag orders (or whatever their jurisdictional equivalents are), and also from threats like offensive cybersecurity firms with clients like disgruntled royalty in nepotistic moncharcy nations states who send bonesaw murder teams after dissident journalists. I (mostly) trust AES (assuming it's properly implemented, and I exclude the NSA from that, and the equivalent agencies in at least a handful of other major nation states). I have a lot less trust in owners and executives at my password vault vendor or their cloud hosting company or their software supply chain. If I were them, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to stick up for my users the way Ladar Levison and Lavabit did. There's no doubt that the right federal agency could apply enough pressure on me and my family/friends to make me give up all my users unencrypted vaults. Sorry, but true.

digdigdag 11mo ago

None of my opinions of this manifesto are positive. This is a defeatist position. It dangerously conditions people to be more casual about their privacy and safety. There are still legitimate reasons to clear cookies, to turn off Bluetooth/NFC beaconing, and to occasionally rotate passwords (vis a vis password managers) as it costs nothing to accomplish, and very little in the way of tradeoffs. So...why not? The probability of a random individual being the target of a sophisticated state sponsored attack is low, but the probability of being caught up in a larger dragnet and for data to be classified, aggregated and profiled is very high. So why not make it just a bit harder for them all? If anything, let's chip away at this problem bit by bit. Make their life a bit harder...their datacenters a bit hotter. Add random fud to the cookie values, constantly switch VPN endpoints, randomize your mac address on every WiFi association, constantly delete old comments, accounts, create throwaway accounts, create proxies and intermediaries, rotate your password and 2FA -- use any legal means to frustrate any adversarial entities -- commercial or otherwise. They want information? They want your data? Fine, overwhelm them with it. THAT should be the proper modern privacy-focused manifesto. This is utterly bewildering... ...but then I get to the signatories and this nonsense suddenly made all the sense in the world: > Sincerely, Heather Adkins, VP, Cybersecurity Resilience Officer, Google > Aimee Cardwell, former CISO UnitedHealthGroup > Curt Dukes, former NSA IA Director, and Cybersecurity Executive > Tony Sager, former NSA Executive > Ben Adida, VotingWorks > Geoff Belknap, Deputy CISO, Microsoft The corporate CISO club is behind this.

torben-friis 11mo ago

I might be alone in this, but I feel the advice regarding 2FA and password managers is putting people into risk. My mom using those would be one “I don’t know where I put that” away from permanently losing access to her pictures or any other similar access. This is as potentially harmful as any attack.

fragmede 11mo ago
Fwiw, Apple has a notion of a recovery contact, someone else who can get you back into your account.

emidln 11mo ago

I'm not a CISO just a random dog on the internet, but this open letter seems to assume that privacy is not a part of your security posture and that spear phishing isn't common these days. (Is 'spear phishing' still the term for targeted electronic scams to steal credentials/access?) I realize not everyone is using a physically stripped burner, a graphene os install, etc and not everyone works at a high value financial, govt, or infra target but for those of us who need to deal with opsec or are commonly targeted by spear phishing this advice seems abysmal. In the current political climate of the US, if you are living or traveling here and the current party isn't cheering for you personally, you really should be considering both state-sponsored attacks and no longer have the luxury of assuming good faith by the state. Telling people to enable cheap drive by attacks that are in active use by certain government agencies is irresponsible malpractice at best and actively evil at worst. Source: I've worked at analytics companies that actively deanonymized users using cookies when available. We used wifi and Bluetooth details when available. We built "multi channel marketing" which was just taking any information we could scrape from the user to fingerprint them and cross reference and deanonymize them so we could sell interactions to businesses like geofenced price discrimination, value of users, and could offer cross website information on shopping habits/financial profile. The shit I did 15 years ago didn't go away and no matter how much I wish I didn't write that, it was the tip of the iceberg and relatively benign.

tptacek 11mo ago
The piece is explicitly about retiring outdated security advice and doesn't claim to provide a complete, coherent defensive posture (that posture would have to depend on who you are and what your threat model is!). I don't like that they included the "recommendations for the public" section, but I don't think there's a reasonable way to read it as intending to be a complete action plan.

croes 11mo ago

Some of outdated advices are rarely a threat just because people follow the advice.

pityJuke 11mo ago

QR Code scams are a very real issue [0]. [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr430eee2w5o.amp https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr430eee2w5o.amp

johncoatesdev 11mo ago
Yes, but the advice shouldn't be "Never scan QR codes", it's more like: "be aware of dodgy QR codes by looking at the context in which it's placed".

ropetin 11mo ago

I find it interesting that the comment about VPNs offering little additional privacy or security benefits is wrapped up under 'Avoid Public WiFi' rather than being called out explicitly. It drives me nuts all the ads I see for NordVPN or whatever claiming that by using their services you are now totally safe from all the hacks. If anything, it makes the median user less safe because they have a false sense of security.

blauditore 11mo ago
NordVPN is also one of the worst offenders in borderline marketing campaigns. Really questionable company.

yearolinuxdsktp 11mo ago

You can only avoid rotation on passwords that are MFA-protected. If you implement a password manager, you must mandate auto-fill only and actively discourage (via training) copy/paste of credentials to a web site. Train the users to view “auto-fill not working” as a red flag. (This doesn’t apply to non-website credentials). Mandate all passwords to be auto-generated. Mandate that the only manually-entered password is the one for the password manager. Of course, you must have MFA on the password manager entry. This will allow your users to comply with frequent password rotations much more easily. Auto-fill requirement/culture is critical to reducing phishing success, especially for tired eyes.

HiPhish 11mo ago

I have two more to add to the list: > Secret questions No, my mother's maiden name is not a secret. And some questions like "who was your best friend in elementary school?" might have different answers depending on when you ask me. Plus, unless my best friend's name was Jose Pawel Mustafa Mungabi de la Svenson-Kurosawaskiwitz (we used to call him Joe) it's pretty easy to guess with a dictionary attack. The only way to answer these questions securely is to make up an answer that's impossible to guess, which results in a second password. > You password must contain these particular characters I understand that this rule is to prevent people from using passwords like "kittycat", but "k!ttyc4T" is still less secure than "horse battery staple correct".

card_zero 11mo ago
I remember that a not-so-recent investigation recommended five words. (Also you got the order wrong, "correct" was at the front, but you'd probably get it right second try, so the concept is still good.)
Waterluvian 11mo ago
> Jose Pawel Mustafa Mungabi de la Svenson-Kurosawaskiwitz How in the #%*^ did you figure out my secret question? I absolutely hate security theatre. And these kinds of things are just that. In fact, I’m sure that difficult to remember passwords make us less secure as we forget or write them down.
thayne 11mo ago
> "kittycat", but "k!ttyc4T" is still less secure than "horse battery staple correct". Well... something like that. Please don't use exactly "horse battery staple correct".
- card_zero 11mo ago
  Oh, that was probably the point, that it's very weak but still better than k!ttyc4T. We both got downvoted for not picking up that implication. This thread requires too much mind-reading for me.
- 11mo ago

thomastjeffery 11mo ago

Don't worry about cookies or bother using a VPN, because... you are being tracked anyway? What's the point of including such a defeatist stance? > the real world across industry, academia, and government. Gotcha, so no one here gives a shit about privacy. They only care about avoiding the inconveniences of fraud and leaked secrets. Use a password manager and a feature-complete adblocker (ublock origin on Firefox). Send messages over end-to-end encrypted channels. Use a VPN along with your adblocker and some kind of cookie/browser-id isolation if you don't want your traffic stalked.

golem14 11mo ago
BTW, I really would like to have a way to partially clear cookies – i.e., I don't want to be signed out of gmail, and maybe not out of the Mechanic's Bank of Alaska or Amazon or Netflix, but most other things could go. I don't think this is easy in Chrome, Safari or other mainstream browsers, is it? Yesyes, I do know that Big Ad can mostly stitch together some proxy profile of me anyway, but it would be more blurry.
- thomastjeffery 11mo ago
  Firefox has a great feature for this: multi-account containers. The UI is trash, but it's usable.
- dolmen 11mo ago
  Just use a separate browser profile for your critical accounts.
  - golem14 11mo ago
    Doesn’t this leak info when clicking on a link in say gmail opening that link in another profile? Most URL’s have pretty long extra strings in them that I assume are just cookie-equivalent?

drtgh 11mo ago

That open letter is filled with malice, so I can only guess that it's either trolling or a bad taste joke (due people could think are outdated recommendations and spread, lets remember the flat-earth thing).

f_devd 11mo ago
Where do you detect malice? The claims are quite accurate.
- drtgh 11mo ago
  Accurate? Lets take the Wifi (Other users already commented the other ones). Open a wifi access point with the name of the restaurant, intercept the DNS requests and serve your filtered stuff. PS: If the text is real and not trolling, the keyword in the text is 'rarely happen', which we could apply to car seatbelts then.
  - jrjfjgkrj 11mo ago
    what filtered stuff? you mean partial web pages? most browsers use DNS over HTTPS
  - johncoatesdev 11mo ago
    And how exactly do you plan to forge the SSL certificates to deliver your filtered contents?
  - quesera 11mo ago
    > intercept the DNS requests and serve your filtered stuff. How do you get from a malicious DNS response to a browser-validated TLS cert for the requested host?
  - 8organicbits 11mo ago
    Then what? The user presumably sees TLS certificate warnings since you don't have valid certicates. HSTS would prevent downgrades to plain HTTP and is pretty common on sensitive websites. Isn't the better advice to avoid clicking through certificate warnings? That applies both on and off open wifi networks. There is a privacy concern, as DNS queries would leak. Enabling strict DoH helps (which is not the default browser setting).

ralph84 11mo ago

How about these: - CISOs aren’t actually officers of the company and are typically 2-3 levels below the actual officers - CISOs only exist to have someone to deflect blame onto after the inevitable breach - If a company actually cared about security they wouldn’t put it in a silo

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TZubiri 11mo ago

Knowing what rules not to follow and what isn't a risk is important to know where to invest energy. Tech and non tech users have a budget to spend on IT Sec, so if you impose a lot of useless or marginally useful rituals along with the useful prophylaxis, the user will be forced to drop some of the measures, so it's better to drop some rules early on by policy rather than letting users decide what good practices to avoid.

peanut-walrus 11mo ago

For 1, you can still have extremely malicious networks. It's true that your web traffic is likely encrypted but... What services are exposed on your machine? Do you have mapped samba shares? For 5 - session cookies are one of the main things stealers look for. Deleting cookies is absolutely good advice until browsers build in better mitigations against cookie theft. For 6 - if there was a standard interface how password managers could rotate my creds, I would sure as hell use it. Force rotating passwords is only "bad" if people need to remember them. Any random credentials stored in a vault absolutely should be rotated periodically, there is no reason not to. I don't see the point of this letter, none of the "bad" advice they call out is harmful to security in any way, if people feel safer avoiding public wifi, so be it. Is it just a call out to other cisos to update their security hygiene powerpoints?

NegativeK 11mo ago
While you and I would love it if password managers would rotate creds, we're not yet at the point where people will use password managers. They're still using CompanynameFall2025!. Next month, they'll dutifully rotate their password to CompanynameWinter2025! because their work policy is still stuck on shitty standards. > This kind of advice is well-intentioned but misleading. It consumes the limited time people have to protect themselves and diverts attention from actions that truly reduce the likelihood and impact of real compromises. When you've got 15 seconds to _maybe_ get someone to change their behavior for the better, you need to discard everything that's not essential and stay very very far away from "yes, but" in your explanations.

villiage 11mo ago

I don’t understand why people promote password managers for individuals. You don’t need to store your password in a central location that is a prime target to hackers; even if it’s encrypted, that’s more of a risk than keeping one of your own. And some of the previous advice they’re stepping back from like avoiding QR codes you’re unfamiliar with is still good advice; you should be careful and not expose yourself too much.

NegativeK 11mo ago
1. People are terrible at creating strong passwords. People will NOT create hundreds of strong passwords. 2. People will not use complex solutions unless actively and rigidly enforced. 3. At best, we can hope that they can create one really good passphrase. That's combined with MFA. There are people that are exceptions to those, but they're vanishingly small percentage of the population. And unfortunately, there are a way, way more people that think they have something better but are deluding themselves -- like bad card counters that casinos are happy to have at the blackjack table or non-experts rolling their own crypto.

exabrial 11mo ago

> Use SMS one-time codes as a last resort Let me fix this for you: > Never use SMS one-time codes as a last resort

BLKNSLVR 11mo ago

Slight tangent: My wife's place of work has recently instituted a minimum 16-character password rule with the standard complexity requirements. They also encourage the use of password management software, as well as enforcing password changes every 6 months. Where I see a flaw in this is the initial login. If you're not already on your computer to access the password manager, how do you retrieve the essentially non-memorisable password to unlock your computer in order to get to the password manager to retrieve the essentially non-memorisable password? The password to unlock the computer, therefore, must be able to be remembered. This pretty much excludes 16-character auto-generated passwords for anyone but a savant. Am I missing something obvious here? (MFA using an authenticator app on the phone? Is that something that Windows / Mac/ Linux supports?)

wordpad 11mo ago
I've not met anyone who doesn't just increment a digit at the end every 6 months. And any password length requirement beyond 8 always ends up being just a logical extension of 8 character password (like putting 1234 at the end), if 16 characters is required one would just type their standard password in twice. If a any of the old passwords (potentially from unrelated applications) get leaked, it's almost trivial to guess current password.
- BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
  Yeah, that's kinda my point, increasing the complexity requirements counter-intuitively reduces, or at least doesn't change, the actual level of security provided. It's a wetware limitation. Not that we don't have methods that could improve it, it's just that they're not yet implemented at this specific point of contact. Interestingly.

Taek 11mo ago

I don't really like the name. When you say 'Hacklore' I think of the hackers at MIT and such. That stuff is really cool and shouldn't be stopped or suppressed! But the message, absolutely on board with it.

dadrian 11mo ago

This is good advice, and there's good people on the signature list, but why is this is an open letter? This feels navel-gazey and straight out of 2017.

donald6 11mo ago

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donald6 11mo ago

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splintersio 11mo ago

What Bob and the signatories fail to recognise is that they're attempting to swap out nuanced advice for foundational advice and they're patting themselves on the back for it, actually. that foundational advice has always been the nuanced advice is for unsolved problems, so ... if you ask a nuanced question, you'll be ... directed back to foundational security advice ? I don't think they've thought about it, perhaps Signatories shouldn't play risk-advice cosplay at population levels. I'd be annoyed if this influenced policy because of who they are and not how dumb the logic is.