Category Archives: Password Safe

Using Hacked LastPass Keys to Steal Cryptocurrency

Posted on by

Remember last November, when hackers broke into the network for LastPass—a password database—and stole password vaults with both encrypted and plaintext data for over 25 million users?

Well, they’re now using that data break into crypto wallets and drain them: $35 million and counting, all going into a single wallet.

That’s a really profitable hack. (It’s also bad opsec. The hackers need to move and launder all that money quickly.)

Look, I know that online password databases are more convenient. But they’re also risky. This is why my Password Safe…

Continue reading Using Hacked LastPass Keys to Steal Cryptocurrency→

LastPass Breach

Posted on by

Last August, LastPass reported a security breach, saying that no customer information—or passwords—were compromised. Turns out the full story is worse:

While no customer data was accessed during the August 2022 incident, some source code and technical information were stolen from our development environment and used to target another employee, obtaining credentials and keys which were used to access and decrypt some storage volumes within the cloud-based storage service.

[…]

To date, we have determined that once the cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys were obtained, the threat actor copied information from backup that contained basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service…

Continue reading LastPass Breach→

Why I Hate Password Rules

Posted on by

The other day, I was creating a new account on the web. It was financial in nature, which means it gets one of my most secure passwords. I used Password Safe to generate this 16-character alphanumeric password:

:s^Twd.J;3hzg=Q~

Which was rejected by the site, because it didn’t meet its password security rules.

It took me a minute to figure out what was wrong with it. The site wanted at least two numbers.

Sheesh.

Okay, that’s not really why I don’t like password rules. I don’t like them because they’re all different. Even if someone has a strong password generation system, it is likely that whatever they come up with won’t pass somebody’s ruleset…

Continue reading Why I Hate Password Rules→

Vulnerability in the Kaspersky Password Manager

Posted on by

A vulnerability (just patched) in the random number generator used in the Kaspersky Password Manager resulted in easily guessable passwords:

The password generator included in Kaspersky Password Manager had several problems. The most critical one is that it used a PRNG not suited for cryptographic purposes. Its single source of entropy was the current time. All the passwords it created could be bruteforced in seconds. This article explains how to securely generate passwords, why Kaspersky Password Manager failed, and how to exploit this flaw. It also provides a proof of concept to test if your version is vulnerable…

Continue reading Vulnerability in the Kaspersky Password Manager→