1y ago

More than $35 million has been stolen from over 150 victims since December — ‘nearly every victim’ was a LastPass user

www.theverge.com LastPass security breach linked to $35 million stolen in crypto heists

Researchers found that almost every victim was a LastPass user.

More than $35 million has been stolen from over 150 victims since December — ‘nearly every victim’ was a LastPass user::Security experts believe some of the LastPass password vaults stolen during a security breach last year have now been cracked open following a string of cryptocurrency heists

TechNews @radiation.party

VERGE

Experts link LastPass security breach to a string of crypto heists

www.theverge.com /2023/9/7/23862658/lastpass-security-breach-crypto-heists-hackers

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188 comments

Bitwarden or keepass ftw
- I dumped LastPass for Bitwarden a few years ago. So glad I did.
  
  Same! Thinking i coulda been a victim in this attack is scary!
- Selfhosted for extra win!?
  
  Any recommendations on how-to?
  
  Self-hosted with yubikey 2fa. Even Santa Claus can't see my info 😎
- So what makes Bitwarden better than LastPass if you're using Bitwarden's hosted option (I know you can keep it locally).
  
  From what I remember (take this with a grain of salt since it’s all from when the big LastPass breach happened,) LastPass didn’t actually encrypt your entire vault. They only encrypted the passwords. The rest of the vault, (which would be comprised of usernames and the sites that are associated with them, notes, images, etc) were unencrypted. So even without cracking any vaults, hackers got access to gigantic lists of usernames and their associated email addresses. That’s valuable in and of itself, because it allows them to spear-phish those users.
  For example, you may not fall for a regular phishing scam. But you may fall for it if the email has your username and recovery info in it. Because they know every email you’ve used to sign up for something and all of your different usernames that you used on that site, so they can craft convincing phishing emails that are specifically tailored to you.
  It also allows them to search for specific users. Maybe there is a user on a crypto forum who is particularly noteworthy. Their username is already known on the site, and hackers are able to cross-reference that with the list of known usernames/emails and see if that user’s vault was part of the breach. If it was, they can focus on breaching that one user’s vault, instead of aimlessly trying random vaults.
  
  I’m not 100% but I think Bitwarden actual encrypt the entire ‘password object’. So the url, username, password, and any notes. Lastpass didn’t/doesn’t encrypt the url so if anyone gets access to the vault, they have a list of websites where the person will have an account and can more accurately send phishing emails.
- There's no such thing as an impenetrable password manager. I keep my most secure passwords in my head, and so should everyone.
  Even if the software were perfect, people aren't. Anyone can be fooled under the right circumstances. It's better to expose one service than all of them at once.
  
  Your head cannot be securely backed up, and you are not resistant to major thread actors (torture, and so on)
  
  2fA is an important element too.
  
  How would someone steal my password and my physical yubikey for 2fa?

Nearly every victim was a LastPass user.
But every victim was a cryptocurrency user.
- I'd be willing to bet that people store their key phrases in the notes section in LastPass which was not encrypted at rest
  
  I'm sure they were encrypted. But attackers have the vaults and many people have bad passwords. Brute forcing these days is less about trying every combination and more about trying all known leaked passwords, because people reuse passwords like crazy and also just aren't as original as they think.
  If you have millions of password vaults, I'm sure you can crack open a small number. And the ones you can crack are probably the most likely to not be following best practices, meaning it's more likely they haven't changed their passwords since the breach was announced a while back and they probably are less likely to have 2FA. 150 victims is such a tiny number for how many vaults were stolen when LastPass got compromised.
  
  This is incorrect information. Notes are encrypted, just not their "type". Unfortunately the most direct source for this is a reddit link, but here it is anyway.
- This doesn't say anything about crypto.
  It says everything about the users themselves.
- I also heard every victim were addicted to water…
  
  *was

Switched to bitwarden as soon as they tried to charge a sub for multiple devices, I see that was the right choice
- Are you not worried your vault is still on their servers? I feel most companies don’t delete shit. Most have ways to get around it saying they keep some info for taxes, accounting, etc.
  I wouldn’t sleep well knowing my passwords were on there at any given time.
  
  You can host a bitwarden vault yourself. They open sourced and audited. So, trustworthy that there's no back door somewhere to some degree.
  
  So just change whatever passwords you had saved to LastPass. That would mitigate any issues, right?
  
  It's e2e and the code to do so is opensource, and you can always host Vaultwarden yourself.
- same here. nuked my lastpass account and switched everything over to bitwarden. their paid offering was worse from the competition and now i’m very glad i moved from them
  
  Was it a huge pain in the ass moving over or fairly painless? I need to do this.

These guys saved their seed phrases to LastPass, not just account passwords. You can't just change your seeds without moving funds to a new wallet.
The main lesson here is never store your seeds in digital form, ever. Write it down by hand on paper at creation and then take additional efforts to safeguard it.
- I just store recovery phrases of all kinds on an encrypted USB stick (which is obviously only connected to my PC when I need to put a new one in or use it (which so far has happened never)), I feel like that is secure enough for me, although if I could laminate at home I might print and make small cards in a separate a card wallet. Any other way I feel like I would eventually lose them, the particular USB drive ive had for over 15 years, it is 512 MB lol.
  
  USB sticks are not very reliable and can become totally unreadable randomly. I hope you at least have a few backups of it
  
  I would duplicate to at least 2 sticks, and also a written form that you keep stored with important documents, like a safe with your SSN, birth certificate, etc.
  
  For any significant amount of money, the seed should never even touch a PC. No USBs, no printers.
- I wrote my seed information down for my poop coin wallet directly on Charmin double ply and then promptly wiped my ass with it and flushed.
  All my apes gone!
  
  Shit coin is far superior than poop coin. All the apes have shit coin. You never lose the password to shit coin, there's always more shit coin passwords.
- How were the wallets cracked? Cracked the master password?

instead of using a password manager managed by a PRIVATE ENTITY people should start using bitwarden ... its opensource, free and much more secure and reliable
- But who is running the bitwarden server? Bitwarden the private company.
  I self host vault warden, but it's really not something everyone can do.
  
  Vaultwarden is incredible, and runs easily on freebsd.
  
  Or should, for that matter
- I personally use KeepassXD on my phone, although it hasn't had a security audit. There is also KeepassXC for desktop, which has had an audit
- Bitwarden, the host, is a private entity
- I prefer local password managers. Synchronisation is achieved with a syncing service of our choice.
  
  That's pretty much what Bitwarden does at its core. It will only synchronize the encrypted password vault and each client keeps an offline copy of it.
- How does bitwarden encrypt their passwords? Im just realising that since it works on both my laptop and phone with no configuration it can't be overly nuanced
  
  It's encrypted on the client and bitwarden themselves can't decrypt it (we assume, but there have been audits that seemed to confirm that).
  If you want to you can just run your own server then they can't see the traffic at all.
- Private entities are more reliable for personal data than companies whose stocks have gone public.

Man am I glad that I picked KeypassXC as my password manager some years ago. Super safe, easy to use, costs nothing, not dependant on internet/cloud, can export data to another app at any time, transparent because open source.
I'm using Syncthing to synchronize across devices which arguably took some fiddling to set up but I only had to fiddle once and haven't touched the configuration since; it just works automagically in the background.
- Keepassxc and syncthing? Are you a clone of myself? :D
  Same setup, working as a charm
  
  It's a pretty common setup to be clear, easy setup, works like a charm.
  Just keep in mind that it's not a backup solution, my Homeserver does that for me.
- I use KeepPass, what's the difference?
  
  Nothing major as far as I can tell. Here's an overview via SuperUser. KeePassXC might be a better option for some use cases if you're mostly not on Windows as it does not require .NET. Note that "KeePassXC does not support plugins at the moment and probably never will", but it does have built-in support for some things you might want a plugin for in KeePass2.

Pro Tip: You don't need to give a private company all of your passwords. That literally defeats the purpose of having passwords.
- Except you’re giving your passwords in an encrypted format. So if the company is trustworthy, it’s safe to let them store your passwords because it’s encrypted in such a way that even the company who own the password manager couldn’t access your passwords even if they wanted to.
  (Note the caveat of “IF the company is trustworthy”, which rules out Lastpass)
  Now I accept that there are legitimate arguments against storing passwords in the cloud via a password manager… so in that case, you may wish to use a local password manager (like Keepass) instead. But realistically, a typical person isn’t capable of memorising lots of unique, secure passwords… so the passwords need to be written down or stored in a password manager, just to avoid weak passwords or password reuse.
- A-fucking-men... but I was always given shit for saying this.
  Anything can be hacked or stolen, I don't trust any company to secure my information. :/
  
  I keep thinking of the people who make their passwords garbled random text impossible to memorize but then they trust an online service to keep it safe and private. When breaches happen, maybe even a post-it note at home would have been more secure.
- This. This. This.
  I vote for you to be chair person of the board for common sense.

Any obvious holes in keeping a text file on my laptop that I encrypt when not using it? Using ccrypt on linux.
I do not want my passwords - even encrypted - on the cloud or at the mercy of a 3rd party in any fashion.
- Use KeePass.
  My concern with using a text file is you have to defrost it to use it and whenever it's not encrypted it's potentially exposed. You are also vulnerable to keyloggers or clipboard captures
  KeePass works entirely locally, no cloud. And it's far more secure/functional than a text file.
  I personally use KeePass, secured with a master password + YubiKey.
  Then I sync the database between devices using SyncThing over a Tailscale network.
  KeePass keeps the data secure at rest and transferring is always done P2P over SSL and always inside a WireGuard network so even on public networks it's protected.
  You could just as easily leave out the Tailscale/SyncThing and just manually transfer your database using hardware air-gapped solutions instead but I am confident in the security of this solution for myself. Even if the database was intercepted during transit it's useless without the combined password/hardware key.
  
  Absolutely, Keepass is a great alternative to cloud managed password managers.
  You are also vulnerable to keyloggers or clipboard captures
  Keepass (and most password managers) are vulnerable to this as well.
  
  Is there a recovery process if your yubikey breaks?
- Yes, if you write the decrypted file to disk, it could be recovered. Deleting files only removes the file system entries - it does not wipe the content.
  Use a local password manager. KeePass (use the KeePassXC variant on Linux) is the most popular choice. If you prefer a command line tool, pass (passwordstore.org) is an option.
  
  Thanks, great point. Lots of suggestions for KeePass here, so I'll definitely look into it. I appreciate the command line tool recommendation as well, as that's my preference. Cheers!
- Why not use KeePass then? It's entirely local and you don't have to risk running your own encryption solution.
- All it takes is a malicious program accessing your clipboard or running commands to find your password file while your machine is booted and decrypted.
  
  If something happens to your SSD, you lose all access to everything. And SSDs can die without warning, and be un-recoverable.
- Would cloudless self hosting count? https://keepassxc.org/
- If we're talking crypto keys like in the article, that would be an improvement over storing them in the cloud, but it's still vulnerable to malware/keyloggers. Ideally you should use a dedicated hardware wallet and/or write it down physically and have some form of offline signing setup.
- If you care about security, use FDE. Then a text file with proper file permissions is probably fine.

That's an average of over 200k each. I'm wondering how they managed to target people with so much money.
- People with less might just not complain loudly

migrated my shit out of lastpass like 10 years ago or whenever it was bought by logmein. douches.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs reports that several researchers have identified a “highly reliable set of clues” that seemingly connect over 150 victims of crypto theft with the LastPass service.
Taylor Monahan, lead product manager at crypto wallet company MetaMask and one of the key researchers investigating the attacks, concluded that the common thread connecting the victims was that they’d previously used LastPass to store their “seed phrase” — a private digital key that’s required to access cryptocurrency investments.
These keys are often stored on encrypted services like password managers to prevent bad actors from gaining access to crypto wallets.
We have reached out to LastPass to confirm if any of the stolen password vaults have been cracked and will update this story if we hear back.
Researcher Nick Bax, director of analytics at crypto wallet recovery company Unciphered, also reviewed the theft data and agreed with Monahan’s conclusions in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity:
“I’m confident enough that this is a real problem that I’ve been urging my friends and family who use LastPass to change all of their passwords and migrate any crypto that may have been exposed, despite knowing full well how tedious that is.”
The original article contains 363 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 46%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
- Good bot

I mean, they've had more than long enough to change passwords.
Nobody is after your password for the Moravian rug weaving forum but in this day and age it's on you, if you know there's a breach and you don't change your banking / crypto passwords.
- Cannot change crypto seed phrases (but that can be mitigated). Cannot change addresses, social security numbers etc
  
  You can create another wallet and move all the funds there

I don't understand saving your passwords to the cloud in the first place
It is like storing all the passwords in one convenient place that can be accessed from any location on the planet, making it the most convenient and juicy target for hackers.
Even encrypted, it just doesn't make sense.
- At one of my clients, a large institution, they go further: you're not allowed to use the local browser's password manager. And still have to abide by the usual password rules: rotate every 3 months, complex passwords, etc.
  As a result,, users store a plain text file on their desktop (some go as far as printing it), that conveniently allows them to retrieve their passwords.
  Too much security kills security.
  
  Forcing a password change after a period of time has shown to make people gravitate towards the simplest passwords that are still within the policy or other, even less secure, solutions. That's why security standards nowadays advise to not implement forced password changes.

After years as a family plan subscriber, I moved my personal (1k+) passwords off of LP after the last -- and most egregious -- breach. I have quite a bit self hosted in my environment but Proton Pass interests me as I can get my wife and son in it easily as we already have the family plan. Lemmy is loaded with tech savy, so my question is; same devil different form? I've tried BW but it wasn't condusive to the whole familys use (at least not a few years ago).
- This is my problem. I have a family that includes several elderly people. It was a HUGE accomplishment to get them onto LastPass. Nothing more complicated than that’s going to work. Hell I do not want to take the time figure out any self hosting crap.
  I’ve tried 1password and hated the UI.
  Any other suggestions?
- If it is cloud hosted then there is always a possibility. Programs like keypass run locally and are only in jeopardy once your system is compromised. The issue with keypass is implementing it for multiple users is probably a chore (never looked into it).

All that promotion/awards tagging as best password manager for nothing. Glad I picked up KeyPassXC and KeyPassDX and sync between my phone and PC with gdrive
- At first I was confused about why this was being downvoted, but then I noticed the "gdrive". You're using a different cloud to avoid this specific cloud.
  
  Not really a problem until aes-256 is broken, especially with an extra pass file and/or hardware Tokens.
  But yeah that's suboptimal
  
  I know google sucks but it's easier to sync across and I have separate key file locally on both devices... 🤷

Is there any reason to use a password manager over just an excel spreadsheet?
- The excel spreadsheet can be read by anything. And if someone gets hold of it either through malware or access to the computer, they get all your passwords.
  A password manager allows to store the passwords in an encrypted file. The file being encrypted, if the password is strong, may not be accessed easily or fast enough to be worth the effort.
  
  So then why not use pen and paper and be done with it? It's basic opsec
  
  And thanks to online syncing of the password manager, not only can anyone who can access your PC read your password, but in case of Lastpass, anyone with access to the internet can!

So what makes lastpass untrustworthy and do we think competitors like 1pass are any different?

The only password manager I trust to connect to the internet is the Firefox manager, Keypass for the important stuff.

The seeds are passphrases anyway. Just memorize them. Passphrases are so that they are easier to memorize.

Anybody serious about security wouldn't store vital passwords online in the first place. The convenience isn't worth it when whatever company is used gets hacked because an intern got phished.
- on serious services wallets are encrypted using your master password, and unless you chose "password" you can be almost certain you won't get hacked even in case the company gets breached

188 comments