LinkedIn password leak

https://usblog.kaspersky.com/linkedin-password-leak/7160/

by trumpeter • 10 years ago

398 207 10 years ago

usblog.kaspersky.com

ryanlol10• 10 years ago

My theory is that this data leaked via custhelp.com, the filename of the data dump I have (linkedin.cfg) seems to support that.

This would also explain linkedins initial "confusion" regarding the hack.

danso2• 10 years ago

Could you elaborate? Also, when you say '"confusion"', do you mean it was feigned?

ryanlol10• 10 years ago

Linkedins support site URLs (hosted by custhelp.com) used to look something like this http://linkedin.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/*linkedin.cfg*/php/endu...

I know custhelp used to be particularly insecure right around when this hack happened, as I myself discovered several vulnerabilities back then.

Also, when you say '"confusion"', do you mean it was feigned?

Partly. From what I recall it took them quite a while to own up to this very easily verifiable hack, which could very well have been because they couldn't figure out why it happened because it didn't actually happen on their systems.

luso_brazilian• 10 years ago

Considering the amount of "growth hacking" LinkedIn use (used?) to so, sending too many emails to too many people this breach can be much more dangerous than usual.

People raises eyebrows when they get phishing emails but when it comes purposely from LinkedIn and vouched for by your social and professional circle it could get much more credible and easy to fall.

foota• 10 years ago

I got an email from linkedin a couple weeks ago and had the hardest time deciding if it were real or fake.

jedmeyers• 10 years ago

test sample passwords with our password checker here.

Do NOT do that with your exact password though :)

ludamad• 10 years ago

It should of course not determine if you change your password, but no harm putting a password you no longer use

pdq• 10 years ago

Link: https://password.kaspersky.com/

I'm impressed by the password cracking estimation with the Tianhe-2 Supercomputer. A 10-character password containing uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and numbers, which is estimated at a 4 year crack with a Macbook Pro, takes 31 seconds on the supercomputer.

zaroth4• 10 years ago

The timing are meaningless since it depends entirely on the hashing algorithm and how much key stretching was in place.

Is even the basic ratio/multiplier correct? Supercomputer is 1,000,000x faster than a 2012 MacBook Pro? I tried a few random strings and saw ratios as high as 3,000,000 - why would the ratio change based on the password? Probably because the number is nonsense.

ufo2• 10 years ago

Looks like they are using zxcvbn[1] to calculate the password entropy and converting it to a time with these parameters:

    computers               speed factor
    ------------------------------------------------
    ZX Spectrum             k: 1300    // 30 guesses per hour (?)
    Mac Book Pro (2012)     k: 1       // 10 guesses per second (?)
    Conficker botnet        k: 5e-5    // 20000 guesses per second (?)
    Tianhe-2 Supercomputer, k: 3e-7    // 3000000 guesses per second (?)

The following line of code suggests that the speed factor is compared to 10 password guesses per second:

    Passwrdr.crack_time = result['crack_times_seconds']['online_no_throttling_10_per_second'];

[1] https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn

ryanlol10• 10 years ago

Damn, my desktop is a total of 80000000000/3000000=26666.6666667 times faster than the Tianhe-2 supercomputer!

More realistically though, Kaspersky just really sucks at password cracking.

forgotpwtomain2• 10 years ago

62^10 > 2^58. At 2^58 that would take ~ 2.28E+09 guesses per second - I'm really not buying this.

oxguy3• 10 years ago

Woo, I created my LinkedIn profile in 2015, so I should be safe since the leak is supposedly from 2012. If anyone else isn't sure when they made their LinkedIn, you can see your join date here (ctrl+f "Member since"): https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/

wrong_variable• 10 years ago

I created my profile at 2012 - thanks for that information !

Is it possible for me to check the data link to look my name up.

Benjamin_Dobell• 10 years ago

Yes, leakedsource.com, select "email" from the drop-down and use the email you had associated with LinkedIn in 2012.

I'm in the list :( I can't remember what password I was using in 2012, but I changed my password again anyway. At least it was never the password associated with my Gmail login, cause I'm not a derp so I don't use that anywhere but Gmail.

cfontes• 10 years ago

2009... Awesome.

Linkedin should probably be the one warning me about this, but I never heard of this before.

Edit: filtered as Spam, nevertheless they should have locked my account.

redbergy• 10 years ago

I received multiple emails this morning from LinkedIn advising me to change my password.

semi-extrinsic• 10 years ago

I believe it's been proven impossible to write a spam filter to distinguish useful LinkedIn email from spammy LinkedIn emails, since the spam filter would then be able to solve the halting problem.

joering2• 10 years ago

Glad to hear your Spam Filter work fine!

gukov• 10 years ago

Just had my 10th anniversary a few days ago.

Tharkun2• 10 years ago

I got an e-mail from LinkedIn today saying that I would be forced to reset my password upon my next login. They didn't say why. I guess this explains it.

FroshKiller• 10 years ago

The email did say why:

"We've recently noticed a potential risk to your LinkedIn account coming from outside LinkedIn. Just to be safe, you'll need to reset your password the next time you log in."

Tharkun2• 10 years ago

Yeah, that's vague garbage. What it should have said was: "Our password database was stolen and we fucked when we tried to roll our own password hashing. Your password is likely compromised and you should change it. If you use the password on multiple websites, you should change it everywhere."

acomjean• 10 years ago

I got an email too this morning too.

They invalidated my password.

My session was intact, but a password reset was required on next login, and they encourage two factor. I did that despite not really wanting linkedin having my phone number...

When you change the password, you can click a box to inactivate all other sessions.

joelthelion• 10 years ago

Do we know how strong their hashing scheme was?

Edit: SHA-1... You'd think a site as big as linkedin would have strong hashing...

conradk• 10 years ago

Just read about it being sha-1 (source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/257045/security/6-5m-linkedin...).

vthallam• 10 years ago

Sha-1 with the hashes salted.

Edit: "Motherboard conversed with someone at LeakedSource who claimed that they managed to crack 90 percent of the LinkedIn passwords within three days. Though LinkedIn says it has hashed and salted its stored passwords for several years now"

http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/18/linkedin-resets-passwords-...

zaroth4• 10 years ago

From that 2012 article:

"What's also troubling security researchers is that the password database contains entirely unique passwords. It's unclear whether the people who leaked the password file have more passwords that have not surfaced online. The file may, for example, be an attempt to crowd source the hacking of some of the more difficult passwords."

Well Per Thorsheim called that one!

bogomipz• 10 years ago

Why would you think that? Linkedin isn't really known for substance or integrity are they? Also didn't it come to light that they didn't use salts either?

tptacek2• 10 years ago

LinkedIn has a solid security team today. That was probably not the case when this breach apparently happened, though. Just because the dump leaked today has SHA-1 hashes, doesn't mean that's what they're doing now.

wglb8• 10 years ago

If you look at Cory Scott's linked-in profile, you can see that there was NO security team before he was hired. None. The breach happened before he arrived, and he is now having to deal with a four year old breach. He has built a substantial team from nothing and from what I can tell is doing all the right things.

jlgaddis• 10 years ago

Unsalted SHA1.

adriancooney• 10 years ago

This is just unforgivable. This is such an incredibly basic and simple to implement feature and they've just ignored it. There should be some legal repercussions for companies neglecting security. When they surpass 100,000 users, a mandatory security audit should be passed (like a health and safety inspection). Data breaches like these just happen far too often.

Diederich• 10 years ago

It was their legacy but still in use auth system. Accounts created past some cutoff (before the exploit) were in another, more secure system that did not use sha1.

They didn't move fast enough to get accounts moved over.

awinter-py• 10 years ago

beyond linkedin logins, they also have a zillion email passwords from the bad old days before oauth.

may• 10 years ago

You can see how long you've been a LinkedIn member by going to your Privacy & Setting page, where it displays at the top.

https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/

open-source-ux• 10 years ago

As someone who isn't versed in security issues, can anyone explain how security breaches like this one (and Adobe etc.) occur?

I'm assuming (and I may be completely wrong) that some kind of software monitors if the database of customer details is being downloaded. If a download is detected, an alert is issued. Does software like this exist? Or there other measure that guard against these data breaches?

icebraining• 10 years ago

I'm not a security expert either, but I doubt most companies have anything like that running. Many leaks happened through the site itself, which is expected to be able to access and present that data, and even if the attacker transfers an actual file, it's fairly easy to encrypt it beforehand.

There is some software that can detect an anomaly in the regular pattern of network usage, and possibly even cut the connection, but again, I'm not sure how effective they would be here.

In any case, considering they were using unsalted SHA-1 hashes of the passwords, which was well known to be a poor practice, you should probably assume they had very little protections.

Coincoin2• 10 years ago

You don't necessarily need to get your hands on the actual database. You can also obtain the data through a side channel such as debug pages or errors messages being a little bit too generous with information.

tomc1985• 10 years ago

a) Basically the cracker acquires access to parts of LinkedIn's database that store user login details, including scrambled versions of passwords. Unfortunately, the algorithm used to do the scrambling is easy to undo. Since the dump is/was being circulated in the underground, anyone with a copy of it and a little bit of time can presumably unscramble the whole list, revealing all passwords stored at the time the dump was generated. Given that so many use the same login/password for multiple sites...

b) There is software (intrusion detection systems/software, or IDS) that does that, but it is rarely present by default. The hows and whys of IDS can be difficult for non-security types to grok, and it can be costly in terms of time, equipment, and money, so it often not encountered.

benologist• 10 years ago

I got an email from them this morning about this, it just smells like all their other junkmail begging me to +1 their active users.

Why don't they invalidate the passwords all at once instead of letting -- someone -- use the potentially compromised passwords again...

0x6c6f6c• 10 years ago

Users that may no longer have access to the email on that account would have a very difficult time regaining access. But overall definitely a better idea than letting a massive number of users get locked out by someone with the hacked credentials

hayd• 10 years ago

Then what good is sending out the warning via email?

tomp• 10 years ago

Incredible... The email says:

"We've recently noticed a potential risk to your LinkedIn account coming from outside LinkedIn."

That's almost as bad as saying "we take security very seriously" after a hack!

optimusclimb• 10 years ago

What does that even mean?

How can a risk come from "outside" LinkedIn related to my password? If I haven't leaked my own password, then there should be nothing to fear, and my account should be secure.

Unless of course LINKEDIN ITSELF is compromised, and leaked my password. In that case, the wording about "coming form outside LinkedIn" just smells like BS/spin to me.

ljk• 10 years ago

gotta spin!

hsod• 10 years ago

FWIW, I was forced to reset when I tried to log in (although prior to that one of my active sessions was still working)

electic• 10 years ago

Folks, this is becoming a common occurrence. Use a password generator and password vault to protect against this type of scenario.

copperx• 10 years ago

A password vault ties you to a particular computer or mobile device. It's terribly inconvenient. But it's the best thing that we have today.

dangerlibrary• 10 years ago

keepass + dropbox works ok.

stephenitis• 10 years ago

useful tool to check your emails https://haveibeenpwned.com

https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites hasn't been updated yet with this yet because the list hasn't leaked entirely.

Also change your password: https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/change-password

vermooten• 10 years ago

Who cares if their LinkedIn account gets hacked? In my case they'll be able to see 500+ recruitment agents I've never heard of as my 'contacts'.

cschmidt• 10 years ago

I think password reuse is the big deal. Lots of people use the same passwords on more important accounts, which they would mind losing.

ryan-c2• 10 years ago

I know of a company that experienced a data breach (one that was reported in the news) due to an employee using the same password on linkedin as on their company account.

dredmorbius• 10 years ago

Password reuse, possible impersonation. If you work in a sensitive area, or deal with those who do, possible career, safety, or life risks.

oneloop• 10 years ago

Just because you don't know how to use LinkedIn...

wglb8• 10 years ago

1: Change your password. RIGHT NOW. If you’re not sure how strong your password is, test sample passwords with our password checker here. Seriously?

Keep in mind that these estimates are based on some bogus entropy estimation. If a password hacking guy runs the correct dictionary past the hashes you password generates, it might be as small, well, as the first one tried. For example, run the passphrase Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn1 past the kaspersky bruteforce estimator, you get 10,000 centuries. But this is clearly false, as inicated in http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/08/thereisnofatebutwhat.... They clearly "cracked" this in far less time: "in a matter of minutes".

saidajigumi• 10 years ago

As an aside, it can be so difficult to get this across to folks who aren't in the infosec headspace. I've seen even technical, computer science types absolutely not get that their ad-hoc memorable password "but no one would EVER guess that!" schemes are probably much more vulnerable than they estimate. Nevermind, even, true computing laypersons.

ben_jones2• 10 years ago

We have to rotate our password advice to family and friends every couple years or so. It used to be "use a random combination of memorable words with a number thrown in" a la "reddogbarkhard7". Now I feel like right after guessing the 10k most common passwords a hacker would immediately brute word combinations with a single integer ending.

ashitlerferad2• 10 years ago

The only sane schemes are ones that choose passphrases solely based on entropy. So, Diceware or other random generation systems.

joepie91_2• 10 years ago

I've found that it helps to, rather than going directly into the mathematics of it all, explain to somebody that their password is going to be cracked by a computer rather than a human, and computers 'think differently'. Thus, you need to make things that seem complex to computers, not things that seem complex to humans.

The same applies verbatim for people trying to roll their own 'clever' encryption schemes.

fnordsensei• 10 years ago

So, being one of the people who hovers around laymanship when it comes to these questions, how hard is it to crack a randomly generated 25 character string with 5 digits and 5 symbols? This is typically what I would use for a website.

chronial• 10 years ago

How do you randomly generate these passwords?

garethrees• 10 years ago

Such a password has about 157 bits of entropy, which is far too big to be found by any kind of brute-force approach.

Of course there are other ways that a password can be cracked, for example an attacker who breaks into the server can capture it as it is submitted. So it's still worth having a different password for each site.

wglb8• 10 years ago

That is a good choice, and it is what I recommend to whoever will listen to me, and a few that won't.

I use and recommend 1Password. To evaluate a password manager, check this page https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/15416/1password... for good questions to ask. For example, what data they can turn over, what their encryption practices are. Key phrase: "There is no data of yours that we keep, so there is nothing to turnover".

This can't be said by all password managers.

xapata• 10 years ago

Depends on how that password is stored. Mostly.

Your alphabet, lowercase + uppercase + digits + symbols, has 72 characters. There are 72 ways to pick the first character of your password, 72 ways to pick the second, etc. So there are 72 to the 25th power possible passwords, about 7.5 times 10 to the 46th (about 7 followed by 46 zeroes).

That's fewer possibilities than the number of atoms in the universe and fewer possibilities than the ways you can order a deck of cards, but if a computer can calculate one hash per nanosecond, it'd take about ... well, more millennia than I know the words for. Even if we're talking about a cluster of GPU machines, it's effectively forever. Unless you had some infinite improbability drive (like a quantum computer?) and you guess correctly on the first try.

So what did you use to generate the random password? Did you use your favorite programming language's pseudo-random number generator? Remember, "anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin" (John von Neumann). A bad random number generator might only have 2^32 possibilities.

Let's put that aside. It's unlikely that the hacker knows which random number generator you used. It's much more likely that the company storing your passwords is not storing them securely. Passwords should not be stored, ever. Instead, the company should store a hashcode. The hashing algorithm should be like the butterfly effect -- a tiny change in the password produces an unpredictable difference in the hashcode. Unfortunately, many older hashing algorithms, like MD5, are predictable. A hacker can find an MD5 collision -- not your password, but one that hashes to the same hashcode -- within minutes.

There's more to it, but my advice is NEVER rely on password security by itself. If you care about your security, then use 2-factor authentication or physical security in combination with password protection.

Edit: Am I incorrect? I see there was a downvote. Please educate me.

eru4• 10 years ago

Do you actually generate your strings randomly, or do you rely on yourself, a puny human I suppose, to generate it?

OhHeyItsE2• 10 years ago

Aren't cracks of this nature thwarted by salting?

ryanlol10• 10 years ago

No. Salting mostly prevents rainbow tables from being very useful, but rainbow tables are questionably useful anyway with modern hardware. (Obviously depending on the type of the hash)

scoot• 10 years ago

> test sample passwords with our password checker
Seriously?

Sample passwords, not your actual passwords.

If you follow that link, they reinforce that with: "Never enter your real password".

wglb8• 10 years ago

Yes, that is the actual instructions that they give.

Imagine a relative of yours who is much less computer savvy than you are. What are the chances that the actually enter their real password?

And what value is this check, actually, on a fake password. "Your fake password will take xxx centuries to crack". So how does the non-tech savvy person, who might have a struggle coming up with a real, useful password, then enter one that is similar but not exact and expect a measured response?

So even if they collect "simulated" passwords, password cracking is less about entropy and more about generating dictionaries based on patterns that users are likely to use.

There isn't any value in such a site, and I claim it is less than useful.

dclowd9901• 10 years ago

Ok... 10,000^4 * 10 = 100,000,000,000,000,000 @1,000,000,000,000 passes per second (nsa level bruting) = 27 hours to break one single password. There's far more low hanging fruit in an encrypted list of passwords than to bother with random common word combos. Unless you're a specific target, it's not lucrative to a hacker to use brute forcing to get through the last 10 or 20% of users with good passwords.

jasonpeacock• 10 years ago

Also, why is the 2FA option hidden under "Privacy" and not right next to the Change Password option?

You'd think they would want to advertise 2FA better...

jimktrains22• 10 years ago

Why do people insist on using sms as the second factor? Let me use TOTP (e.g. Google Authenticator). I don't get reception everywhere!

bigiain3• 10 years ago

I get you - but how many places do you not get sms reception but you still have enough internet connection to be trying to log in to LinkedIn? (Inside a data center, maybe?)

metafunctor2• 10 years ago

Not only that, but in general, I don't want to give them my phone number. They'll just leak it or abuse it.

Google Authenticator is great, and I use it anywhere I can. I also take a physical backup of the seeds in a secure (and secret) location, in case I lose my device.

discordance2• 10 years ago

2FA doesn't mean much if the user can 2FA from one device (i.e. Login to a site from a phone and request the 2FA SMS to the same phone).

Something needs to change here.

metafunctor2• 10 years ago

I disagree. Even if you use the same device to access a service, you still need the device to authenticate. It's authenticating by more than one factor. You need my password, plus my phone, plus possibly a way to access my phone (my PIN code or fingerprint). That's much better than just a password.

heartsucker• 10 years ago

I'm going to use this to recommend a CLI for strong, memorialize passwords (if you're not using something like KeePass).

https://github.com/ulif/diceware/

    $ pip install diceware
    $ diceware -n 8 -d ' ' --no-caps
    proton hunts blake 31 pope pivot taped plain

zeveb2• 10 years ago

Aaaand that's why I use 'pwgen -s 22' to generate a unique password for every single site I use. I don't care if a salted password database is stolen; heck, as soon as I change my password I don't even care if a plaintext database is stolen.

Why -s? Because it means each password is a complete word, and may easily be double-clicked in a password list (which is nice, because selection is copy in X).

Why 22 characters? Because 22 mixed-case letters and digits are just over 128 bits of entropy.

Say it with me:

    pwgen -s 22

godzillabrennus• 10 years ago

Good for you. Too bad most people can't even be bothered to use more than a couple variations of the same password.

This is an area that will get much more attention in coming years as technology finds better ways to authenticate us instead of using secret codes we have to remember.

toast0• 10 years ago

I use pwgen for sites where I care if my account is compromised (and store them in a gpg text file), but for all those sites where I don't care, I use a terrible password, because I wouldn't care if my login on most random forums I joined to read some attachment that was members only or my linked in (if I had one) was stolen, chances are I'm going to forget I have an account there before it gets compromised, so it doesn't bother me.

I've used some sites which had a login cookie, and if you lost it, you just put your email address in and they'd send you a new link, no password needed; much nicer for many things.

nathanaldensr• 10 years ago

I use KeePass' password generator, which defaults to generating random sequences of 20 uppercase, lowercase, and digit characters. Usually the passwords are between 100 and 120 bits of entropy. I try to use only letters and numbers because they are easier to type on mobile phones and other non-physical-keyboard-driven devices.

savanaly• 10 years ago

How do you track those passwords? I presume not with a password manager otherwise it would be creating your passwords for you. Do you keep them in a text file on your computer or write them down and carry them around with you or something?

zeveb2• 10 years ago

I store them in an encrypted file on my computer: the encryption password is memorable, but since I have physical control of my computer (I hope!) I think the security tradeoff is a win. Rather than many memorable-but-guessable passwords scattered across numerous services, I have one memorable-but-guessable password (well, passphrase) securing a file I control.

Writing them down would probably be even better.

LeoPanthera3• 10 years ago

I use "apg".

    apg -a 0 -n 1 -m 14 -x 14 -M NCL

-a lgorithm 0 is "pronounceable". 1 is "random chars".

-n umber of passwords to generate

-m inimum and ma -x imum length

-M specifies what types of characters to use. N = Numbers C = Capital letters L = Lowercase letters. You can also add S for punctuation.

14 chars with numbers letters and caps gets you ~80 bits of entropy, which is the NIST recommended value for passwords.

I store them in 1Password. (Whose password generator I don't like, but is still infinitely better than picking your own passwords in your head.)

newman314• 10 years ago

Why not?

discordance2• 10 years ago

That's sound advice, but most of the other people on the Internet (and most of the people in the leak) don't consider entropy when authenticating with their bank/Facebook/gmail etc.

Creating your own passwords and typing or copy/pasting them in is a broken authentication experience.

misiti3780• 10 years ago

this might be a dumb question - but if the password was unique to that account AND you have 2 factor auth enabled, is there any reason you need to change the password ?

so if some hacker somehow manages to backward engineer a salted-bcrypted-hash of my unique password, he still cant get in without my cell phone

vemv• 10 years ago

he could attemp to reuse the password in other websites

nighthawk454• 10 years ago

Perhaps they won't get into your account without your password and phone. However, you've reduced your 2-Factor to 1-Factor since the password is now known. You're still relatively safe - at least safer than not having 2-Factor auth - but changing passwords is cheaper than the risk of relying on 1-Factor auth.

adamredwoods• 10 years ago

2-step authentication?

DyslexicAtheist• 10 years ago

is it even verified that the data isn't again the warmed up stuff that surfaced from LinkedIn's 2012 breach? This is quite common these days.

kazinator3• 10 years ago

If you’re not sure how strong your password is, test sample passwords with our password checker here.

That is irrelevant in the face of leaked passwords; what matters most in that situation is that your password is something other than your leaked one.

If the passwords were leaked due to being stored in plain-text, no amount of complexity would protect them, obviously.

Don't use the same password on multiple sites. If your LinkedIn password is leaked, you don't want that same password to grant access to your bank account. That just as important than how strong the password is, if not more.

If some site has suffered a password leak, and you're a user of that site, you must change the password on that site, and also on all other sites where you happened to use the same password. Do it as quickly as possible without worrying how strong the new passwords are. Then change later to stronger ones.

A password's strength is inversely proportional to how often you change it. For instance, if you happen to change a password every week (for the sake of argument---few people likely do), and it takes a month to crack on the best available hardware cluster, then you're probably okay. If you change only once a year, you're much less okay; a surreptitious password breach could happen, and two months of cracking later, the attackers have your password. Meanwhile, you're still months away from changing it, not knowing there had been a breach.

By the time users learn about a breach---if ever---they should assume that their passwords have been cracked, because some unknown amount of time has passed between the actual break and the discovery. The discovery will likely stem from the fact that some of the "lower hanging" passwords have been cracked and accounts start being misused. The site admins can then only guess from various circumstantial information (logs or whatever other breadcrumbs left bind) about when the leak might have occurred.

lazaroclapp• 10 years ago

If the passwords were leaked due to being stored in plain-text, no amount of complexity would protect them, obviously.

One assumes LinkedIn does not store plain text passwords anywhere. That would be against best practice for the average PhpBB online forum from the late 90s. It would be criminal negligence from a company like LinkedIn. How strong your password is (and which kind of hashing function the site uses) does influence how long it takes to obtain a plausible plain text password assuming that the exfiltrated data is in the form of a list of salted hashes, which is the most reasonable assumption.

That said, changing passwords everywhere remains the safest course. Since: a) 4 years is a long time to run a password cracker + dictionary, b) there is always the possibility that the passwords were intercepted on server memory before hashing.

Jhsto2• 10 years ago

The said dump contains unsalted SHA1 encrypted passwords: https://www.leakedsource.com/blog/linkedin

evilDagmar• 10 years ago

One assumes LinkedIn would also know better than to tell users "We'd like to import your contact list to match you up with existing members" and then go ahead and spam everyone in that contact list about joining linked in, but that was also shown to be an incorrect assumption.

The only thing one should ever assume with respect to _security_ is that the other party is going to do it wrong unless it's written out for them.

13of402• 10 years ago

Accounts aren't all created equal. Some of my accounts, such as my domain account at work and my online banking account have real power to screw me over. Some are in the middle, like my LinkedIn account, or my gmail account, since they could be used for social engineering. Some are trivial like my Fark account or my Hacker News account. In that last tier, there's no way it's worth my time to keep rotating those on a regular basis. It wouldn't be even that much of a crime to use the same password on them, since there's virtually no way someone's going to pivot from a Fark account into my bank account. So quit being so dogmatic is what I'm saying.

jasonkostempski• 10 years ago

"Some are in the middle, like my LinkedIn account, or my gmail account"

Your email account is the golden key to all other accounts that send "forgot password" links to it.

ryuuchin• 10 years ago

It wouldn't be even that much of a crime to use the same password on them, since there's virtually no way someone's going to pivot from a Fark account into my bank account. So quit being so dogmatic is what I'm saying.

This is 2016, we have password managers. Using different passwords for each site shouldn't be any more difficult than if you had not. Even using the built in ones in your browser of choice is better than not using one at all and makes using site specific passwords easy. Chrome even has a built in password generator for you, I assume this is using your operating systems CSPRNG (or BoringSSL's?) although I'm not 100% sure about that.

JumpCrisscross• 10 years ago

A useful HaveIBeenPwned feature would be a list of pwned passwords connected to my email address.

Yes, I know - don't reuse and use a password manager. But not everyone follows best practice. Knowing which password motifs to absolutely not reuse would be helpful.

benzor• 10 years ago

Question for the more security-savvy among you: If the leak happened in 2012 and I've changed my password since then (it's listed in your account page [1]), do I need to change it again?

Logic tells me I've got nothing to worry about, even considering potential password reuse, if they've all changed since then.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/account

Raticide• 10 years ago

I think you're fine.

Coincoin2• 10 years ago

I changed it when they first announced the leak in 2012. It didn't ask me to change it when I logged today and they didn't send me the email today. I guess they know my new password is secure since I changed it since the leak.

gggggggg• 10 years ago

anyone know how I can get a copy of the list. I want to see if the email/password combination I used back then is still in my regular circulation on other sites.

mkhpalm• 10 years ago

Whats interesting to me is that their spams to change your password showed up on a whole bunch of group email addresses I am a member of. So at some point linkedin went and harvested email addresses that got to my inbox and made a bunch of bad assumptions to include those as secondary addresses for me. I can only assume it was their mobile app, which is now forever uninstalled on all my devices. I simply cannot have them doing that.

jjm• 10 years ago

For those that have forgotten, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073309

Back then there were issues. If I remember correctly, there was some nodejs even after this with no bcrypt.

koyao• 10 years ago

And LinkedIn is now asking me to enter my phone number:

"Add an extra layer of security to your account. Add your phone number."

Leaking my email / password is bad enough; I'm not going to give them my phone number for more damages!

eru4• 10 years ago

Also, access to your phone (or rather anything send to your phone number) is trivial to get via social engineering the telco.

(The attack is not very scalable, but easy enough to pull off against individual targets.)

ILoveMonads• 10 years ago

I'm amazed LinkedIn is as big as it is. They have a big, new, building in Sunnyvale and lots of employees--too many it seems for a simple social network. I drive past their HQ a few times a week when I'm in Sunnyvale and see their employees, who don't look like other tech employees, waddling down the street to the McDonalds on the corner of Mathilda and Delray.

MikeJougrty• 10 years ago

So basically, if I get interviewed by a company and I get asked why I don't have a Linkedin account, am I legitimate to respond to them by saying that Linkedin sucks in many different ways including password breach?

INTPenis• 10 years ago

First off I'd be skeptical about working where they take your linkedin account seriously. Secondly, no. Because everyone sucks, everyone can get hacked, why don't you have a Facebook account, a Google account, it's only a matter of time. No one is invincible.

20andup• 10 years ago

Just points out the fact that we should use password generators for all web sites that requires one.

sleepychu2• 10 years ago

I'm pretty sure the right move for me is going to be to just delete my account. I mainly just receive recruiter spam from it.

warrenpj2• 10 years ago

The best security that an individual can get from passwords is clearly achieved by using a password manager and generating a unique random password for each site, and changing high-value passwords periodically. (It's arguably already impossible for a human to generate or remember enough good passwords, and either way it gets harder as computers get better at guessing human-generated passwords.)

However, from the point of view of someone implementing an authentication system, passwords on their own are broken. There will be a significant fraction of users who re-use their password at a site with minimal-effort security. If you subscribe to the idea that computer professionals have a moral duty to safeguard people's private information entrusted to them, then password-only authentication is just broken.

The solution is to either: spend the money to implement a multiple factor authentication system (with a secure password database and fraud detection) or use a federated identity service. (Even just sending a one-time login code via email is fine). The latter is simple and takes even less effort than implementing a password system from scratch.

There should be fines (at the very least) for having an unsalted password database with more than X number of users.

nyir• 10 years ago

Or for an unhashed password database, c.f. http://plaintextoffenders.com/.

unlinker3• 10 years ago

The fact that your password is mailed in plain text to you when you register does not prove the password is not hashed when it's stored.

In a "lost password" mail, of course, that's another thing.

tudorw4• 10 years ago

I've read zero reports of people breaking into houses, finding a piece of paper down the back of the cabinet with lots of passwords on and no site names, then using those passwords randomly to gain access to an unknown system... A 'software' or 'online' password manager seems like a terrible idea, all your eggs in one convenient basket, if Sony and VISA and the NSA are unable to secure their systems 100% of the time I doubt the maker of your software will fare much better over the long term.

joepie91_2• 10 years ago

This is misunderstanding the threat model. Assuming you're using a local password manager and not a 'hosted' one, the moment your system is compromised, you're screwed anyway and so that single basket doesn't really matter anymore.

If an attacker has sufficient access to read out passwords from RAM, it also has sufficient access to just keylog everything.

To follow your analogy: if somebody physically breaks into your home and places a security camera pointed at your safe(s), it's not really going to matter for the average user whether all the safe combinations are on a single piece of paper.

They're going to get them anyway, because they've compromised the environment and can just watch the footage.

noja3• 10 years ago

Not quite: if I can steal your password manager passwords I get all of them immediately, if I compromise your system and you don't use a password manager I can slowly steal passwords over time with some effort.

Most attempts will favour "all and now", above "slowly over time".

tudorw4• 10 years ago

Maybe using a password manager is better than using the password "wizard007" everywhere, including your HN account.

//not-tudorw

tudorw4• 10 years ago

fair point :)

noja3• 10 years ago

test sample passwords with our password checker here.

And you just lost my trust Kaspersky, congratulations.

LinkedIn password leak

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