LastPass user vaults stolen in recent hack

https://blog.lastpass.com/2022/12/notice-of-recent-security-incident/

by mikece • 4 years ago

533 315 4 years ago

blog.lastpass.com

sn0w_crash• 4 years ago

Again?

CommitSyn• 4 years ago

Welp, looks like they were able to copy vaults to crack and, worse yet, they have the unencrypted URLs to choose what to target.

The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data. These encrypted fields remain secured with 256-bit AES encryption and can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user’s master password using our Zero Knowledge architecture. As a reminder, the master password is never known to LastPass and is not stored or maintained by LastPass. The encryption and decryption of data is performed only on the local LastPass client. For more information about our Zero Knowledge architecture and encryption algorithms, please see here.

idatum• 4 years ago

LastPass is an enormous target, obviously. And, I guess, the inevitable has happened: Encrypted trove of passwords is "out there".

Let's assume one's master password is strong. And that LastPass knows how to encrypt data. We're really down to whether 256-bit AES can be brute forced, right? And I guess understanding phishing attacks.

I mean, yes, wouldn't it be great of LastPass took the measures with its development environment years ago? So put another way: Lack of operational excellence hopefully is made for in strong encryption. I hope.

WhatsName• 4 years ago

    contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs,

No I think this is the worst that could have happened short of loosing the clear-text passwords. Noone is going to stop the attackers from looking for high-value login URLs and than spear-phish the password for the offline vault.

Forcing a password reset onto customers is not going to help LastPass here.

eastbound2• 4 years ago

LastPass is an enormous target, obviously. And, I guess, the inevitable has happened: Encrypted trove of passwords is "out there".

This is why a company’s bug bounty should be the sum of the assets protected by the data they have, for all their customers, minus $1.

Sounds crazy? Don’t store all passwords at the same place.

cogman102• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, if you like me have been a LP customer for years you are hosed.

Early on, they only did 500 rounds of AES which significantly weakens you even with a strong password.

So, I've had to change my master password and now I'm in the process of updating all my passwords :(

By not forcing a re-encryption when they uped the number of rounds, LP has hung all their old time customers out to dry with this leak. It's not ok.

tokenfg2• 4 years ago

'form-filled data' includes 'Payment cards' section I believe, which should then make securing your cards an even larger priority than having to change your passwords

rob742• 4 years ago

Hm, with all that talk about "zero knowledge architecture", I thought your vault file would be encrypted "in one piece", not just the passwords. If they have the URLs in clear text, that's not really zero knowledge, now is it? And why do they need the URLs anyway, when I can share the passwords just fine from my local PC? Statistics?!

sf_rob• 4 years ago

Honestly, URLs are a potentially massive threat vector themselves.

Are the urls associated with individual users either directly or in a bucketed fashion? Seems like no to the former but the release leaves a lot to be desired.

Arbortheus2• 4 years ago

Is anyone aware whether Bitwarden encrypts everything, or just the passwords like lastpass?

TechBro86153• 4 years ago

Why are the sites where you have accounts not part of your encrypted vault?

Can someone confirm my understanding that 1Password does in fact encrypt the entire vault, including the URL/domain associated with each login?

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

No, as stated, they don't encrypt the URL. This is likely so that, regardless of what you have entered for your "when is master password required" settings, the browser plugin can highlight when it knows that you've entered a password for a site.

d2049• 4 years ago

Similar to “not your keys, not your crypto” is there not an analogy to be made for passwords? Genuinely interested in the reasoning of people who store their passwords in a cloud service they don’t control.

wmf• 4 years ago

This will keep going until there exists a cloud backend that you do control. People won't go back to non-cloud.

alanfranz3• 4 years ago

It's your keys. The master password is yours only. Plaintext passwords don't exist in remote services; basically they're a specialized version of a storage system (Dropbox?Google Drive? S3?) optimized for password entry sharing between devices, versioning, etc.

snailmailman3• 4 years ago

Wow. This is basically the worst case scenario. Attackers got access to the vaults themselves? While they are encrypted, it all depends on how secure your master password is now. Because the brute-forcing has almost certainly already begun.

I switched away from lastpass to Bitwarden a while ago, and have changed many of my passwords since then. But I’ll probably rotate most of my passwords anyway, out of an abundance of caution.

FatActor6• 4 years ago

This is not the worst case scenario.

This is literally the best case hack scenario.

Why? Because we already know that encrypting something using their strategy is essentially uncrackable.

AES256 is quantum resistant.

The worst case would be silent exfiltration from the LastPass application via malware to steal user master passwords.

In the security game, the crypto is the strongest part, the crypto-system is the weakest part.

CookieCrisp2• 4 years ago

While I agree with your main point, I think confirmation that the URLs weren't encrypted and that they can all be tied to your Lastpass signup information is far from "best case"

lowapm• 4 years ago

I agree this isn’t the worst-case as you mentioned above. However, it is far from the best case scenario which is closer to “only fake testing vault data was exposed”.

The vault leak is acceptable in terms of Lastpass’s formal threat model but could still result in real user pain e.g. targeted spear phishing using plaintext fields like URLs, or compromise for users with weak passwords.

sliken7• 4 years ago

Umm, not sure you understand. Yes AES256 is good, if you have a great password.

However if you take 1M users, as them to set a 12 character password with A-Z, a-z, and at least one digit you'll find an astounding lack of entropy. I believe this is pretty close to LastPass's master password requirements.

If you take the most popular 1M passwords and attack the master password you'll find that you've cracked them. With a 2 generation old GPU and the default iterations of 5000 (like several people mention on this post) you can try 300,000 passwords a second. So 3+ seconds per vault and you'd crack a decent fraction of them.

bawolff3• 4 years ago

The relavent part is what KDF they use on the master password.

Afaict They use pbkdf-sha256, with 100k rounds. which is not bad, but i think a memory hard function like argon2 would be much much better.

So its not terrible, but its not amazing either

bushbaba• 4 years ago

These services should automate the reset of your passwords each month. Would make such an attack less impactful

thaumaturgy2• 4 years ago

Just FYI, password rotation is currently considered an anti-pattern. I think we can imagine some kind of future where there's a common password protocol that user-facing services could talk that would allow certain entities with blessed access to rotate passwords without the user ever having to know about it, but in the current world, rotating passwords causes most users to use weaker passwords.

Thorrez• 4 years ago

Worst case scenario is hackers push out a malicious update that steals master passwords.

JackMorgan• 4 years ago

I switched to KeePassXC and syncthing and other than a little bump once when I accidentally caused a merge I've been really pleased with the setup.

snug6• 4 years ago

I've tried a lot the password safes/vaults, and none of them work nearly as well as Chrome/Googles password manager

You can even use it on iOS, and even use it by default. Even apples Keychain password manager works pretty well if you're all in on apple ecosystem. Only reason I see why you would not use it is if you're not using Chrome or Safari, which is most people.

Yeah, yeah, google evil

mook• 4 years ago

The risk there is more you accidentally make a bad comment on YouTube and Google bans your account, I think. I have no idea if I'd still be able to access my passwords if that happens. At least, personally I feel Google deciding to disallow me from logging in is more likely than Google losing my passwords.

snug6• 4 years ago

That is only a risk for syncing, you would still still have your passwords locally saved

boxed2• 4 years ago

Chromes password manager used to be as safe as a text file on your desktop. Have they fixed it?

officeplant2• 4 years ago

If someone has access to my desktop I've already been compromised enough to not care.

snug6• 4 years ago

Passwords are encrypted, you need to use your computers password to download them decrypted

NaturalPhallacy• 4 years ago

After years (a decade+?) of holding out on password managers I finally gave bitwarden a shot (based on recommendations here), and was able to import ~900 logins from google chrome.

Their UI in the chrome extension (brave browser actually) for changing/editing logins could use a little work, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. I even bit the bullet and now have passwords I don't actually know involved in everyday life. Irritatingly, uploading a video from GeForce's live capture to youtube - despite logging in with 2fa - caused a security freakout at google and now I was forced to change my gmail password.

But I digress, bitwarden even integrates with iOS's login management as another option to Apple's, though irritatingly not on OS X.

SoftTalker3• 4 years ago

I use a PGP encyrpted files on my local computer.

https://www.passwordstore.org/ actually.

I don't trust any cloud-hosted password manager.

drexlspivey• 4 years ago

What if you want to log in from your phone?

SoftTalker3• 4 years ago

I don't do that.

I have a gmail account tied to my phone (Android) and I've logged into that once and it just stays logged in. I don't use that account for anything else.

I don't really do anything else on my phone that requires a login.

Strum355• 4 years ago

There are android apps specifically for this that can fetch from a git repo and you can input your GPG password, with autofill and all

leonsmith• 4 years ago

https://github.com/mssun/passforios which also uses the safari password manager flow so its pretty seamless

Steltek• 4 years ago

Android app that integrates with OpenKeychain and a Yubikey. The Yubikey works with both NFC and USB. The same Yubikey works for SSH to sync passwords with the git server.

bamboozled• 4 years ago

When you're this neckbeard, you don't need a phone...

b0afc375b5• 4 years ago

I also use pass (synced via a git repo) with an android app for my phone and an ios app for my ipad.

aborsy• 4 years ago

That’s a good solution. No third party managing your passwords, no Internet access needed, no apps from random developers, a short bash script with standard GPG, allows 2FA.

jackson14422• 4 years ago

@dang, could the title be updated to indicate that this is another update to the existing blog post? Currently reads like it's a new incident, not the aug2022 incident.

dang2• 4 years ago

Sure, I've added "[updated]" above.

lyu07282• 4 years ago

tbh even "Notice of Recent Security Incident [updated]" instead of "LastPass User Vaults stolen in recent hack" or something feels like PR damage control in favor to LastPass

iLoveOncall• 4 years ago

It absolutely is a new incident. LastPass is in PR damage control mode and trying to make it seem like accessing those backups was inevitable after their source code theft, but it's not the fucking case.

This is yet another failure on LastPass' end. The only thing in common is the attacker, that's it.

ghostpepper• 4 years ago

They updated the fifth paragraph down to mention that encrypted passwords and unencrypted metadata has been stolen - in my mind that practically qualifies as a new incident

heluser2• 4 years ago

Not surprising to see another LastPass incident but I wonder why nowadays anyone would choose LastPass over 1password

CookieCrisp2• 4 years ago

I switched to 1password after this breach was first announced, but I find it a lot more annoying to use (and I found Bitwarden even worse). Granted, nowhere near as annoying as the breach. Lastpass got in my way a lot less frequently though.

bryfb• 4 years ago

I certainly wouldn't choose LastPass over 1Password, but given 1Password is deprecating local storage I wouldn't recommend 1Password anymore either.

heluser2• 4 years ago

I used to have a local only manager but then, obviously, syncing becomes a problem. And then it becomes a choice between syncing an encrypted blob using your own solution (potentially not very secure) vs using a provider who still treats your data as an encrypted blob with no access to the data and tries to do it securely. I think the provider is still more secure (again assuming the 1password access model not talking about LastPass-like providers) plus much more convenient. So if not 1password what would be a recommendation assuming syncing is required?

twistedpair• 4 years ago

I prefer LastPass' featureset over 1Password, when I've trial them both, but I certainly don't prefer LastPass' opsec.

sli• 4 years ago

My local, managed-by-me KeyPass database has never had a security incident or even come close.

That's all I'm gonna say about that.

bagels2• 4 years ago

Would you actually know?

sodality2• 4 years ago

By that logic you also wouldn't know if your keys/password database stored by Lastpass/others (in the browser extension or app) is stolen, it's all just local data.

alanfranz3• 4 years ago

not yet.

But there's actually a lot of surface attack area for those open source tools as well. If you're able to sneak into the supply chain and replace the _client_ with a modified, malicious version, you can make it send the master password AND the database to a remote server. No need to compromise the server. This is true for most commercial password managers as well: but I'd expect the security to be tighter there. No random maintainer should get access to the release page.

My idea was like this: * Use KeepassX built from source * Use Dropbox to sync the kdb files (always encrypted) * Use a firewall to prevent any network connection to keepassx; this way even a compromised client cannot connect and send the data somewhere else. * When updating KeepassX, always build from an older git commit; I assumed that in ~15-20 days if there's a fuckup on git source, it will be announced.

BUT: it was hard. Bitwarden just works better. I still build it from source on desktop computers, though, and take a look at the website before updating, just to stay sure. (And I think IOS app process will make it harder to submit malware there anyway).

Scoundreller• 4 years ago

Lots of good suggestions here.

you can make it send the master password AND the database to a remote server.

I wish it was easier to completely restrict an executable from ever touching the network. Like, point and click.

Now, there’s ways around that (open the browser and a long hyperlink of secrets), but yeesh, it should be easier to block the direct links.

whatshisface• 4 years ago

If you're able to sneak into the supply chain and replace the _client_ with a modified, malicious version, you can make it send the master password AND the database to a remote server

I've heard about this as a possibility for as long as I can remember, but while this remains a possibility, major online providers get hacked every year or so.

alexhjones2• 4 years ago

No need to brute force - if users re-used their master password, it will potentially cross-reference with the correct email and password combo from any number of previous data breaches and pwnage across the net.

yasp2• 4 years ago

Good news for people who followed best practices. "I don't have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun you."

jacquesm• 4 years ago

There isn't just one bear.

AlexCoventry3• 4 years ago

This bear has the ability to spin up an AWS cluster of bears, unfortunately.

AdmiralAsshat• 4 years ago

Why in God's name would they store the URLs unencrypted? Even if they don't crack the account password, you've just given the attackers a lovely dossier of every place I've ever visited frequently enough to make an account. And this is far worse than simply doing reverse-lookups of my email address across site breaches, since I use multiple email addresses and alias-only logins.

Nice. Fucking. Job.

meroje• 4 years ago

Presumably this would be to ease looking up individual items but 1password has been able to encrypt those since 2012. Nice indeed

edsimpson• 4 years ago

Does anyone know if bitwarden encrypts the URL? A quick search of their docs didn’t turn anything up.

sliken7• 4 years ago

Each unique Bitwarden account has an encryption key derived from your Master Password, according to the methods defined in Encryption. This encryption key is used to encrypt all Vault data.

From: https://bitwarden.com/help/account-encryption-key/

Seems crazy for anyone to keep using LastPass

joenathanone• 4 years ago

Not to mention some of the saved URLs may include sensitive information in the URL query string, including things like email address, physical address, etc...

jasonhansel• 4 years ago

Also: thanks to "forgot my password" features, if someone gets your email password, they can now find and access all your (non-2FA-enabled) accounts.

dvngnt_• 4 years ago

no because your email is usually 2fa. I could give you my gmail password right now but you wouldn't be able to be logged in

dotty-• 4 years ago

LastPass storing the URLs unencrypted is so mind boggling. What could possibly be the justification for that? Also -- LastPass is being intentionally unclear when they write

stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, *such as* website URLs,

What do you mean such as?? What else is unencrypted? Now is not the time for tip-toeing around this kind of stuff.

intelVISA3• 4 years ago

"proprietary binary format"

weird term for std::vector<std::string>

nycdotnet• 4 years ago

This repo claims to document the vault format.

https://github.com/cfbao/lastpass-vault-parser/wiki/LastPass...

Beltalowda2• 4 years ago

LastPass storing the URLs unencrypted is so mind boggling. What could possibly be the justification for that?

I've never used LastPass, but if the URLs would be encrypted then checking "is there a password for news.ycombinator.com?" would require unlocking the vault, right?

So then you'd at least have to enter your password once on (browser) startup so it can load the list and keep that in memory, and you won't be able to automatically sync things either.

haunter2• 4 years ago

Theoretically this can happen to Bitwarden Web Vault too, right? Unless I self host it of course

sliken7• 4 years ago

Sure, but it's 100% encrypted, not some silly case where things like URLs are in plaintext.

jupp0r• 4 years ago

What makes you think that it couldn't happen to your self hosted vault?

haunter2• 4 years ago

It's more like I'd accept my own fault more than trust a 3rd party (Bitwarden, or LastPass) in this case

blakesterz2• 4 years ago

It's not clear to me, does this mean EVERYONE that uses LastPass got hit or some subset of users?

dodgerdan• 4 years ago

Everyone.

dangero2• 4 years ago

To further increase the security of your master password, LastPass utilizes a stronger-than-typical implementation of 100,100 iterations of the Password-Based Key Derivation Function (PBKDF2), a password-strengthening algorithm that makes it difficult to guess your master password. You can check the current number of PBKDF2 iterations for your LastPass account here.

I just checked my account and it says 5000 not 100,100 -- there's no way I would go in and change that setting, so this is pretty disingenuous. They must have changed defaults at some point

snailmailman3• 4 years ago

I do think the default a long time ago used to be very low. I know I went in at account creation and set it to something way higher than it's default at the time.

Looking now though, it says 100100 for me. But i also know i changed my master password at some point, so maybe i got reset to the current default.

hunter2_3• 4 years ago

One would think that the UI where one routinely enters their master password could silently double as a start using the new default UI, as the change-password UI seemingly does.

g_p3• 4 years ago

According to [1], there were 5,000 client-side rounds of SHA256 in key derivation in June 2015.

It does sound like a missed opportunity to have an at-login upgrade mechanism to upgrade KDF rounds that can be carried out seamlessly or near-seamlessly during the login process. Or at least actively nudging users to change password and thus raise their KDF rounds that way through the default.

[1] https://blog.lastpass.com/2015/06/lastpass-security-notice/

tokenfg2• 4 years ago

Mine was set to 5000 too, which is the old default. Does this make the vault data significantly more vulnerable?

snailmailman3• 4 years ago

From what I understand, yes. PBKDF2 is the algorithm that goes from password->key. This key is then used to encrypt the vault. Guessing the key itself is impossibly difficult. Attackers will instead try to guess the password, run their guess through several thousand rounds of PBKDF2, and attempt to use those keys to decrypt the vault.

The algorithm is designed to be run in iterations to be tunable. more rounds takes a lot longer. this makes for both a slower login, but also slower brute-force attempts for the attacker. The attacker can likely still generate guesses in parallel, but each individual password guess will take considerably longer against more iterations.

Lastpass changed the old default for a good reason. I'm surprised they didn't update all accounts to at least the new default.

AlexCoventry3• 4 years ago

It means the master password can be brute-forced about 20 times faster, so about effectively a loss of about 5 bits of security, compared to an account where the number of iterations is actually 100K.

stefan_• 4 years ago

Why on earth is that even configurable, what a bizarre decision. It's like my bank asking me how many bits I'd like in my hashes, only more useless.

This kind of meaningless voodoo is a big red flag for any "security company".

PebblesRox• 4 years ago

If it’s a tradeoff between login speed and security, it seems reasonable to allow users to chose where they want to land between the two, at least within reasonable parameters.

fomine33• 4 years ago

Decryption is done on user device so default iteration is set not to be too slow on slower devices. If your all devices are fast enough, It's good to configure it.

dangero2• 4 years ago

Exactly, and it's buried deep in a menu that I didn't know existed

cogman102• 4 years ago

I have an older account, it was 500 when I went to check. I'm livid that LP didn't do a reup on the encryption when they moved to 100k cycles. They've basically hosed every customer that's been with them for a while.

mister_tee• 4 years ago

mine was set to 500 (not 5000) as well. I'd moved on from lastpass earlier this year but didn't delete my account... though I suppose in that case I'd wonder if I'd deleted in time, or if they really deleted all my info.

Also frustrating that they decided to drop this update on December 22.

And how do they square "Zero-knowledge security" and the diagram in https://www.lastpass.com/security/zero-knowledge-security

with URLs and last-accessed times being plaintext? I suppose "items in your vault" is doing a lot of work there if they don't count urls as "in" the vault.

AlexCoventry3• 4 years ago

I have heard that 5,000 is only for client-side stretching, and there is a further 100,100 iterations server-side.

https://infosec.exchange/@epixoip/109570669464755692

shadowgovt• 4 years ago

I've done a lot of things wrong with OPSEC in my life...

... But I never trusted a third party to store all my passwords.

hbn• 4 years ago

Why do people use password managers that store all the data on their own servers? Having a centralized database filled with full login information for hundreds of thousands of accounts across all your users (and accounts users clearly care about, mind you, otherwise they wouldn't go out of their way to use a password manager) makes for such an obvious jackpot attack vector that causes situations like this.

I've used Enpass for years now which lets you sync your password database to DropBox, Google Drive, iCloud, etc. So I still have to protect whichever cloud storage account I'm syncing with, but at least it's not an obvious place to find passwords for thousands of users. And if someone did have access to my Google or Apple account, they could reset a lot of my logins anyway.

And I know this isn't technically as safe as the self-hosted options, but it offers the same convenience as LastPass without the obvious painting-a-target-on-your-own-back by handing all your passwords over to The Passwords Store.

camel_Snake• 4 years ago

Just chiming in to say I've been satisfied as an Enpass user as well. Felt like a good middle-ground to me and I bought the app before the restructured their pricing model so I was grandfathered in.

clumsysmurf• 4 years ago

Is Enpass an electron based app?

spoils19• 4 years ago

This is important: please respond. I generally disallow electron apps on my personal machines as a matter of principle.

leetnewb2• 4 years ago

For me, the usability of a password manager depends on convenient, secure password sharing that only seems possible with a hosted option of some sort. Granted, one or more of those options might be self-hostable, but that brings other complexities.

lxgr3• 4 years ago

Why do people use password managers that store all the data on their own servers?
sync your password database to DropBox, Google Drive, iCloud, etc.

So instead of storing it all on one service, store it on one out of three others?

Yes, you can set up your own hosting etc., but 1., will your average user do that, and 2., will they be able to maintain an adequate security posture of their self-hosted server?

Besides centralization being, as always, hard to avoid in practice, having a password-specific storage service also has several advantages over a generic "bucket of data" cloud drive.

For example, I'd expect a (competent) provider to invest some resources into

- Server-side deletion when I change my master password (cloud storage often keeps file versioning around for extended periods of time)

- Access logging, i.e. making sure that it is architecturally very hard to download my encrypted vault from an unknown device without triggering some sort of after-the-fact notification to me

- Limiting API and service attack surfaces, i.e. not offering their storage as part of a suite with other services that have different threat models, such as photo and video storage (accessible to backend batch jobs to rescale/reencode the media for multi-device viewing etc.), data sharing and others

mjsweet2• 4 years ago

I just went into my old lastpass account to try and wind down the account, delete everything, and then close the account.

No option to "select all" in the list so I resorted to clicking the check box on by one down the page. I accidentally slightly clicked outside a check box... guess what? Everything gets deselected.

Start over.

Ok start again, maybe I want to list in alphabetical order rather than group by category to minimise mistakes. Whoops, selecting that option deselects everything in the list.

300 odd deleted in batches of 30-40.

When a company's whole application is covered in anti-patterns and dark UX to make it as hard as possible to leave then companies like this deserve to die.

Deleting the account is a bit tricky too.

1. Go into account settings in the top right drop down 2. In the Links area click on "My Account" which spawns a new browser window 3. Click the red "Delete or Reset Account", you can't miss all the red buttons 4. You can either reset your account or delete, choose delete 5. A modal will appear telling you stuff, enter your master pw, a reason why your leaving and then click delete 6. You will be asked twice if you really really want to do this 7. Press ok

robszumski• 4 years ago

It's become so clear that users of a SaaS deserve more control how their data is used and stored.

You should absolutely be able to crypto-shred your data from such an important service. This experience sounds awful.

flandish• 4 years ago

I had migrated away a year or so ago. Tried to log in to confirm, it did not work. Tried password reset. No reset email. So that’s good… I guess.

I remember deleting my acct. not sure if I manually deleted entries before though.

That said - if a data breach includes backup access… is your account ever really deleted?

drewnick• 4 years ago

I also did not have a "Select all" box but was able to check the first entry, scroll down, hold shift, and check the last box which then selected all items in between. So I removed all of 600 of my accounts in about 20 seconds. Hope this helps someone.

aendruk• 4 years ago

Shift+Click to select a range is so second nature by now I don’t think it would have occurred to me to look for (or on the flip side, create) a dedicated “all” button.

phillipseamore8• 4 years ago

Something like this might work, open DevTools and do: document.querySelectorAll('[type="checkbox"]').forEach(function(el) {el.checked=true;})

joshka• 4 years ago

The checkboxes are buttons :)

invalidator• 4 years ago

I did it in the web UI in a couple minutes with down-space-down-space-down-space....

Also make sure to go to Advanced Options, View Deleted Items, and purge them from there.

mjsweet2• 4 years ago

That's how I did the last one hundred or so in the end too. Someone also said shift click works to select everything as well, I tried it but it didn't work for me in Safari.

rob742• 4 years ago

I don't think that's dark UX, it's just shitty UI design. What bugs me the most about LastPass is how it tries to be so damned helpful and offers to fill in credentials on sites that they clearly don't belong to, or offers to save credentials on a site where I alredy clicked "don't save" 1000 times, no really, I don't want to save my private passwords in my company vault thank you very much, why the f$%& don't you have a "don't bug me again" checkbox in this sh*$$y popup?!

rzzzt• 4 years ago

Something something Hanlon's razor.

nashashmi• 4 years ago

https://lastpass.com/delete_account.php

zacharyvoase• 4 years ago

The fact that it ends in `.php` is not inspiring confidence. It's 2022, it's so easy to make pretty URLs.

hangonhn• 4 years ago

BTW, if you're exporting your data, check that it's all there. I had the unpleasant experience of noticing Lastpass either has a buggy implementation or intentionally giving an incomplete export. I ended up needing to manually copy credentials over one by one.

I hate Lastpass so much.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

It is a little weird — I vaguely recall that the sort of “diplomatic” answer about password managers has been for a while something like “well, you should use keepass and just keep things local, but if you want to ease of use, lastpass is not too bad.” So that went right out the window I guess.

I mostly use keepass, but for some accounts I don’t really care about I’ve started using the built in Firefox/iOS stuff. Giving that a second thought about now…

rosywoozlechan• 4 years ago

open the dev console and use Javascript. Find the input element to check and create a query that sets them all to checked with https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/qu...

mrlatinos• 4 years ago

I'm not able to delete my account. The modal that opens is empty. I think they've disabled it.

kc10• 4 years ago

Just deleting the account won't solve the issue anyway.

I am resetting all the passwords for all my accounts. It's super annoying and it will days for me to reset all the passwords. But thankfully I have MFA for all important stuff.

x86hacker10103• 4 years ago

Just type this in the web console for now:

for (item of document.getElementsByClassName('vault-item-displayname')) { item.click() }

yoaviram• 4 years ago

Send them a data deletion request. This service makes it easy to do so: https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/lastpass.com

lbj• 4 years ago

Well.... Unencrypted access to all the sites each username/email has an account with could be very damaging for some individuals.

jamal-kumar• 4 years ago

I'm sorry but if you were using this why are your passwords in the cloud? Doesn't that whole concept set off like thousands of alarm bells in your mind about how it could go wrong?

I know it's convenient or whatever, device synchronization or whatnot but compromising security for convenience is a thing I thought we might have been aware of avoiding at this point.

autoexec2• 4 years ago

You're not wrong. Somethings are fine to keep on someone else's server but a record of every password you have probably shouldn't be one of them.

phillipseamore8• 4 years ago

I'd like to point out to users who have 2FA on their LP access and think they are safer, that does not protect the vault in a compromise like this, it only enhances the security of delivering the vault, the attackers here already have the vaults. Vaults are only protected by password.

rangersanger• 4 years ago

their marketing team needs to get their shit together and not have a newsletter signup popup on this particular page.

mhss3• 4 years ago

When I worked at LogMeIn (previous owners of LastPass), I relocated to Budapest and worked in the same building as LastPass' engineering (I was in another division though). Getting a sneak peek of how the sausage is made gave me the hibbie jibbies and I switched to 1Password there and then. It appears like I dodged a bullet.

__turbobrew__• 4 years ago

What did you see?

intelVISA3• 4 years ago

Zero Knowledge Architecture(tm)

EspadaV9• 4 years ago

How sausages were made, apparently.

mhss3• 4 years ago

I cannot talk about specifics obviously since I was an employee. I can only say I did not see the sw engineering and infrastructure rigour I'd expect from a service that is managing very sensitive information.

Beltalowda2• 4 years ago

Getting a sneak peek of how the sausage is made gave me the hibbie jibbies and I switched to 1Password there and then

The big question with this is of course if 1Password's sausage is made any better.

berniedurfee• 4 years ago

I hope 1Password is watching this closely and can learn from mistakes made by LastPass.

mhss3• 4 years ago

Yeah I thought the same. I don't think 1Password is immune to security issues. However, after seeing several things I did not like in LastPass development, I decided 1Password was the safer bet. Knock on wood, they claim they've never been hacked and I hope it stays that way.

acdha2• 4 years ago

They haven’t had the history of security problems that LastPass has had, and they’ve taken steps to handle this kind of situation by including an extra per-user key to stymie password guessing if someone does get the vaults:

https://support.1password.com/secret-key/

I stopped using them when they switched to subscription-only but I think it’s in their favor that they have planned for a nightmare scenario rather than assuming it won’t happen.

dpacmittal• 4 years ago

Moving from one cloud based password manager to another is hardly a solution. Use password managers which locally store the file and then sync them with gdrive/Dropbox. You can also add another layer of encryption to the file to be extra safe.

jcadam2• 4 years ago

Looks like I'm out $36. My LastPass subscription auto-renewed TODAY. But I obviously can't trust it, so I'm in the process of changing passwords and emptying my vault :(

phillipseamore8• 4 years ago

Look at it this way: you just bought your self a ticket for the class-action lawsuit.

jcadam2• 4 years ago

Ooooh, there may be a year of free credit monitoring and maybe even a check for $36 in my future.

civopsec2• 4 years ago

I use a password database (a file, local) which is unlocked with a passphrase/word. It takes about five seconds to unlock. This works for me since I almost only use accounts on laptops/desktops.

userbinator• 4 years ago

"Pay us and give us all of your most important secrets, and we promise we'll keep them safe."

In any sane world that would be an unbelievable thing to say, yet entire companies exist with just that intention. Behold the power of marketing.

smcleod• 4 years ago

To quote the verge:

"...The announcement doesn’t get to the part about the vaults being copied until /five paragraphs/ in. And while some of the information is bolded, I think it’s fair to expect that such a major announcement would be at the very top."

jhanschoo• 4 years ago

I use a secret algorithm + common salt that I can perform mentally to derive more-or-less unique passwords from service provider names. I don't trust any password manager, and this gives me the convenience of knowing my password across devices.

edent• 4 years ago

What happens when a service asks you to change your password? How do you remember that it is F4c3b00k$2 rather than F4c3b00k$1?

What happens to your algorithm if the password requirements reject special characters?

KyleJune• 4 years ago

Not the person you were asking but I have a mental algorithm I use that produces unique salt for each website. When I run into issues about special characters not being accepted, I replace them with the number equivalent. For example 5 instead of %. It can be a pain to forget but there aren't many sites I use that are like that.

I still use a password manager I can reference if my algorithm isn't working for some reason.

ramraj07• 4 years ago

I was and am continuing to be a LastPass user. I’ll probably start looking into migrating but not with any great hurry because I never trusted any password manager that much to begin with - never stored my primary account passwords or financial account passwords with them for this reason. Password fatigue is real but not all passwords are the same so why treat them as such?

WiggleGuy• 4 years ago

Note to folks who are migrating away from LastPass now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33810084

javawizard• 4 years ago

Oof, that aged well:

Too much work. At that point, it’s easier to just hack the LastPass servers.

chunk_waffle• 4 years ago

Are URLs the only thing that's unencrypted? That's bad enough, but what about other fields? I know I've accidentally saved passwords in the username field before, stored sensitive info in the note field as well.

I guess moving off of LastPass is how I'll be spending my Xmas...

weaksauce2• 4 years ago

I don't think the other fields would be unencrypted. url makes some sense for an extension that doesn't need to unlock the vault to know if there is a password available for a site. it's not the end of the world but it certainly isn't a great look. look at bitwarden. the hn famous security guy tpatek or however you spell his handle recommended that a while ago and it's open source and pretty good. the ui kinda is not amazing but i guess that's alright. (it's 2022 almost 2023 how are they not letting you sort by recently created/used/etc?)

nequo2• 4 years ago

The notice uses language that implies that other fields were unencrypted too:

  contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data

“Such as website URLs” reads like it’s giving one example among multiple other fields that are unencrypted.

Now I wonder if the notes are not in fact encrypted either since if the user wanted those to be secure too, they would’ve written them in a “secure note.”

lxgr3• 4 years ago

That use case seems to indeed be why they have implemented it that way, but I'd consider this a very poor risk-reward trade-off:

Lastpass isn't exactly (or at least was, when I last used it) perfect at figuring out which part of a URL is the generic part (used for identifying a login site), and which part is e.g. a session token or worse, a deep link that lets me access my account without any further authentication.

TechBro86153• 4 years ago

Why are any fields unencrypted?! That is insane!

The only data I want my password manager to store is a single encrypted blob, and whatever information they need to store so I can safely decrypt it with my master password on my own device.

lofaszvanitt• 4 years ago

The biggest bummer is that it was said back in August that some shitty info was obtained by the hackers... few months later... sorry something else was also obtained. This is the worst. They should've scrubbed everything clean the dev had access to.

As a client, when your instincts kicked in alerting you that your passwords are in danger, you might've been patting yourself in the back saying to yourself: ok, my passes are safe, phew.

Well...

systematical• 4 years ago

Ugh gonna need to reset some shit. Luckily I don't keep financial or my email pass in there. Those few I remember.

mac-chaffee• 4 years ago

They talk about how the federated version is safer due to the long random master password, but...

Federated LastPass is tied to your company's SSO, which means your real master password is technically a login.microsoftonline.com (or equivalent) cookie stored in plain text on your hard drive that is valid for 8+ hours. One bad "pip install" typo and your teams' passwords are toast. That was true even before the breach.

locusofself• 4 years ago

Switched to Bitwarden a couple years ago. It works well for me. Mostly use the Chrome extension and I don't host it myself. Works pretty well with my iPhone as well. and I'm using the free tier.

x86hacker10103• 4 years ago

for (item of document.getElementsByClassName('vault-item-displayname')) { item.click() }

LastTrain• 4 years ago

The amazing thing about this is, if at my company we had a project to migrate that much data, it’d take a month. There would be multiple layers of security to move through. How’d these ‘actors’ sneak in and get it all? I think they’ve had access longer than LP is letting on…

jason-phillips• 4 years ago

To add more data to the other comments, some federal agencies started pushing employees to use lastpass for work-related accounts a couple of years ago.

singularity2001• 4 years ago

Is it easier to guess the master keyword if some of the encrypted passwords are known to the attacker? Because on dozens of (previously hacked?) "unimportant" sites I still used a very week common password.

pushedx• 4 years ago

“The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both _unencrypted data, such as website URLs_ …”

Other threads here have discussed the potential for this collection of sign-up information and URLs to be used for blackmail and to discover hidden services.

There is another major problem: mapping these URLs to existing breach dumps. The attacker now has a list of email addresses and associated URLs. From existing breach dumps (haveibeenpwned.com), they can now try all known passwords associated with these email addresses on all of these URLs. Many passwords stored in LastPass are repeat passwords, and they will gain access to many services without any brute force needed.

There will be a class action lawsuit for this gross negligence in security and false and misleading documentation and marketing materials.

My hope is that LastPass is forced to liquidate all assets and distribute them to their former customers, in addition to being liable for damages and wasted time related to migration to another password managememt solution, not to mention suffering related to any potential blackmail or disclosure of proprietary information.

macrolime2• 4 years ago

Every time you use lastpass to autofill a form. The log your ip adresses, a timestamp and the site you were logging into. Kinda sounds like the attacker got this data.

ThePowerOfFuet2• 4 years ago

Every time you use lastpass to autofill a form. The log your ip adresses, a timestamp and the site you were logging into.

[citation needed]

macrolime2• 4 years ago

In lastpass teams at least these logs are available in the control panel.

zmmmmm• 4 years ago

Unless I missed it they have left out the critical information about the timing of when the password database backup was taken. This makes enormous difference ... it could be that the attackers have had months to brute force this already if it occurred shortly after the August incident vs if it happened yesterday it is very unlikely they have brute forced many accounts.

If they don't know they should say they don't know, if they do know they should absolutely be telling people this!

alzaeem• 4 years ago

I am also looking for this information. I largely switched away from lastpass over the last 12 months, and only a few low-value credentials remain in it. But if this is an old backup, then it is more concerning for me.

ThePowerOfFuet2• 4 years ago

unencrypted data, such as website URLs

Why the fsck are they storing these unencrypted? This is data mining _and_ phishing gold.

What a clown show.

mwaitjmp• 4 years ago

Can anyone explain how shared folders work with lastpass?

How is the data encrypted at rest? Who’s master password is used to store that data?

domlebo70• 4 years ago

Noob here. How bad is this? AES256 is essentially uncrackable no? I think I want to move off LastPass anyway to 1password.

What's best way? I assumes steps are to: 1. Import lastpass stuff into 1password. Rotate all passwords?

rencrisa• 4 years ago

AES256 is still secure, assuming the encryption key has ~256 bits of entropy (32 random bytes). Assuming your master password is reasonably complex, hopefully the encryption key derived from your password has enough entropy.

Despite this, I recommend rotating all passwords (if you don't have the time, prioritize rotating passwords on important accounts / putting MFA on them). For all we know, lastpass might have had a full compromise (i.e. access to unencrypted vaults from malicious source code commits).

dark-star2• 4 years ago

I wonder why people moved away from a (local) KeePass database that is optionally synced through GDrive, OneDrive or NextCloud between their devices. That works perfectly fine and relies only on your KeePass master PW strength, not on some 3rd parties' security

baal80spam• 4 years ago

From the top of my head: laziness, marketing...

hacker_newz• 4 years ago

The KeePass Ui is terrible.

dark-star2• 4 years ago

how so?

_dain_• 4 years ago

Maybe now I can convince my employer to move away Lastpass. I hated it on sight because of the GUI. Look at this thing, it's like Attack of the Fifty Foot Whitespace:

https://files.catbox.moe/d81urx.jpg

voidee• 4 years ago

What are you going to recommend? I’m leery of just moving to another cloud provider.

koreth1• 4 years ago

From what I can tell from reading about this, it seems like people are mainly worried about brute-force password-guessing attacks. Lots of people pick lousy master passwords so there is the possibility of some real damage being done.

What I am trying to suss out is how worried I should be. My master password is a ~20-character mixed-case nonsense passphrase with spelling errors and digits thrown in. Am I being clueless about the threat level if I conclude that there’s a vanishingly small chance my stuff will get decrypted?

Ironically, “switch away from LastPass” was on my to-do list for the holiday week anyway, but now, just to be on the safe side, I guess it will be that plus “change all the passwords on accounts I care about.”

kerng• 4 years ago

Does Lastpass have a requirement on the length of the master password?

Documentation says they recommend 12 characters as minimum, which seems short. Wondering if its enforced or if it's possible to have "password123" as master password?

Also, sounds like URL leaked in clear text - so targeted attacks will be very likely. This is quite bad with long running implications.

Vishalthevaxus• 4 years ago

If you're a LastPass user, you need to be alarmed (and maybe even a little intimidated) by the recent security breach update revealing that threat actor was able to access and copy a BACKUP OF CUSTOMER VAULT DATA, including fully-encrypted sensitive fields like website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data.

SV_BubbleTime• 4 years ago

Didn’t everyone anticipate this? It’s still not a problem if you used a good passphrase, and haven’t reused it anywhere else.

It’s not ideal, but losing the encrypted blob isn’t that big of a deal if all the other parts were working correctly.

Lastpass claims user local decryption so they never had your key.

This isn’t that much different than logging in on a foreign computer, or storing your keepass on Dropbox, or losing a USB with the encrypted blob on it.

I’m not defending them, just being practical that this still won’t effect most users.

nixgeek3• 4 years ago

“all the other parts are working correctly”, is IMHO the issue here, because LastPass doesn’t consider the URL to be sensitive material.

What I think that means is in this breach the bad actor has your account information like emails and IP addresses used to access the vault, but can WITHOUT any brute force also determine every site the vault has an entry to access.

The consequences of that could be severe for some. Did you tell your wife about that account on Hinge or Grindr? Perhaps you live somewhere where being out isn’t an option and could get you killed? Do you have an account on some site or other which primarily exists to leak to journalists?

FatActor6• 4 years ago

If you read any topic on password managers on HN, there is very little technical discussion, its emotional and grandstanding. A majority of the comments tell people why their password manager sucks and your scheme is the best. It's any tech religious war basically, with more sides. But yes, that's the point: the devs start with the presumption that the blob will eventually be stolen and how to protect that. That's the initial value proposition. (Storing URLs in plaintext was dumb, but any browser extension knows every URL you visit, same with your ISP, so there's that.)

blakesterz2• 4 years ago

I did anticipate this... BUT and this is a big BUT... I didn't expect ANY of my stuff to be unencrypted! They keep saying that THEY CAN NOT read ANYTHING in my vault. Now the update says some of my stuff wasn't encrypted. This is way beyond acceptable. I know URLs aren't the worst thing in the world to expose. But the fact that ANY part of my vault is open is wrong.

Fire-Dragon-DoL4• 4 years ago

I wish it was just that.

Apparently URLs are not encrypted, and they also have non encrypted fields about "password breached" and "password poor quality"

selivanovp• 4 years ago

I quit Lastpass about a year ago and at this point I really hope they actually deleted all my credentials and not just pretended to and hid it somewhere else.

nixgeek3• 4 years ago

I think if you’re moving between password managers, probably best to assume they did retain a backup, that said backup was leaked, and given LastPass does NOT encrypt all aspects of the vault, that you need to go ahead and roll almost all the stored credentials.

kosh2• 4 years ago

I switched over a few years ago as well but for some reason forgot to delete my old account. Sigh :(

I never reuse passwords of course but it's still annoying having to go through everything and change a whole bunch of passwords.

sebazzz2• 4 years ago

If you want be into control, host your password database on your device only. Use applications like Keepass(XC) and Keepassium. Optionally sync via a generic cloud provider which is protected by a strong password and two factor authentication.

Fire-Dragon-DoL4• 4 years ago

This doesn't work for any person with a life partner, that will need access to many shared passwords.

anonuser123456• 4 years ago

It can work quite well.

I use Strongbox, a standalone database password manager. My wife and I share a database in iCloud. The database supports concurrent access/syncing and works quite well to share passwords between us.

I trust in crypto to keep me safe. My key is derived from a pass phrase + HMAC-SHA1 digest of a shared secret stored in write only memory (Yubikey, Secure Enclave). My wife’s phone has the same. Our shared mac also has the same.

I could probably host my database on a public AWS bucket and still be safe (120 bits of entropy in the password).

kthejoker2• 4 years ago

Many of the URLs I have stored in LastPass included query parameters, no idea which ones are sensitive or specific to me, but my email, tokens, plenty of plaintext as part of form submissions, etc.

I spent time last night updating passwords, adding MFA to some of my lesser used financial accounts, and (importantly) replacing the URLs with simple top level domains.

phonebucket• 4 years ago

I'm pretty disappointed with how this has been handled. Mainly in two ways:

- The scale of the breach (leaking of PII and encrypted vaults, that URLs are not encrypted) has only come almost 4 months after the initial investigation. When was such a breach suspected in the first place? I would expect extremely timely reponses for this stuff.

- They suggest no recommended actions? Surely rotating credentials should be advised? Feels like they are putting business before security.

It's not just the leak that makes me lose complete faith in Lastpass. It's how they've handled the leak.

rhtgrg• 4 years ago

It's not just the leak that makes me lose complete faith in Lastpass. It's how they've handled the leak.

Absolutely. I'm switching to 1Password, and though the critics are correct that it isn't a great solution (being practically the same solution), at least they haven't stabbed me in the back or weasel worded me...yet. I was a premium subscriber for the 2FA, for all the good that did me.

wlonkly6• 4 years ago

I'm no cryptoanalyst, but it seems to me that 1password's addition of the Secret Key, and encrypting all vault data, put them in a much better position than LastPass was.

[1] https://blog.1password.com/what-the-secret-key-does/

sufficient• 4 years ago

This is a wake up to call to not build your security model on a user chosen master password!

Since the vaults have been stolen, an offline brute force attack can be executed. This attack is no longer slowed down by online protection mechanisms, such as blocking IP addresses. Rather, security now depends solely on the cryptography and thus on the master password chosen by the user.

In the end, it is a single factor that separates the attacker from the encrypted data. If less IT-savvy employees are not adequately trained and supported in choosing the master password, the result is fatal. The extent of this will become clear in the coming months when the attacker has cracked the first master passwords and compromises accounts.

At heylogin, we believe that this security model of traditional password managers has come to an end. That's why we built a new solution that uses the secure element of smartphones to implement end-to-end encryption that is 2-factor secure by default and works without a master password.If our users' encrypted databases were stolen, the attacker would not be able to perform a brute force attack.

I just wrote a post on our company blog about the problems of LastPass and how to fix these: https://www.heylogin.com/en-post/lastpass-incident-2022

hmontazeri• 4 years ago

That’s the reason why passwordless is the way to go…

CHB0403085482• 4 years ago

Has you been pawned? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/lastp...

Friedduck• 4 years ago

I’m on day two of converting from LastPass to another service (Keeper in my case.) Canceled auto-renewal, deleted the account, and exported/imported within a half-hour. That part was painless.

Resetting passwords, however, is something that’s going to take days. Too, you need to track what’s been changed or not, what’s no longer needed and so on.

Further if you’re being prudent you need to notify corporate partners of any credentials they own that may need to change. It’s an enormous waste of time.

The lesson: choose your vendors carefully. Take the extra time to make sure you never need to go through this.

LastPass user vaults stolen in recent hack

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