Tag Archives: password security

Adult FriendFinder Hack: ID Theft is NOT the Only Game in Town

When a breach occurs that shares our personal information we immediately think about identity theft and credit card fraud. More recently we are seeing more health information compromised as well, but the Adult FriendFinder breach changes that focus. The hack still revolves around personal information, but with the exception of the username/password, it does not include social security numbers or credit card numbers. Rather, this breach is focused on a persons sexual preferences or desires.

According to the story at CNN and other news sources, username and passwords were retrieved. As with any breach like this, it is recommended to change your passwords on other sites if you are reusing them, and definitely change the password for this site. While that can be devastating if your username/password combo work on other sites, especially financial sites, we are seeing a different concern arise here.

There are a lot of different data privacy or data breach notification laws that have been passed throughout the country. Originally the focus was on identity data, then moved to health data. Even more recently, Illinois is trying to include marketing data as well. In this situation, we have sexual preference data. This isn’t used to steal a persons identity or charge up their credit card accounts. This type of data is used for extortion or reputational harm. In our overly judgmental society, this type of data can destroy your livelihood.

It has already been shown that victims of the breach can be identified and that there are bad guys that are already using this data to start attacking them. How could they attack? The easiest way is by using identified social media accounts to send spear phishing attacks about the situation to them. A user clicks on the link in the email attack and is presented with a malicious file that gives the attacker control over their machine. This is probably the most likely attack because it is easy and efficient.

The second option is to extort those victims. Tell them that you have this information and if you don’t pay a large sum of money, that information will go public. Of course that information pretty much is public, and the organization of that may be more costly to the bad guys making this less attractive.

In either case, they are playing off of the victim’s fears of this information being leaked. Unlike a credit card number or a password, you can’t just change this information once it is made public. You can attempt a cover story of “that isn’t me” or “I just made that up” but recovering becomes a nightmare.

Even worse, besides not using the site, there is nothing you could do to prevent this hack. While they haven’t given details of how the site was hacked, it appears as though it was from the server, and not a user’s computer. Of course, there is a chance that this could be wrong, but if not, a user of the site has very little control over this happening. We rely on a site to protect this type of data because when they don’t, it can create a nightmare for the users of the site.

If you think you were a victim of this breach, be on the look out for phishing emails. Emails that claim to be about this breach asking you to go to a site to change your credentials, or input other information. Go to the site directly and change your password. If extortion occurs I would recommend reaching out to the local authorities for assistance on what to do.

What Happens When All SSNs are Breached

Visit any news site or social media outlet and you are bound to see news of some new company getting breached. It is a lot of what we talk about these days. Whether it is passwords, credit card information, health information or social security numbers, if it is breached it is headline news. With the exception of those trying to scam the system and get a quick payday, it is getting to the point where most people outside of the information security industry just write it off and don’t give it much thought.

There is a difference between social security numbers or health information that distinguish them from passwords or credit card numbers. They are much harder to replace. Taking a quick look at passwords we can see that it is easy to change them. If my password gets breached, I create a new one. It is usually a simple process that takes very little time. This is especially true if using different passwords for different sites. Credit cards are also fairly simple to replace and come with zero liability. If my card gets breached and there are fraudulent charges I just report them and they are removed. The bank sends me a new credit card and if I am doing regular monitoring of my statements the biggest hassle is changing the credit card that is stored on the different sites.

With social security numbers it is much more difficult to replace them. While they were not meant to be used as identifiers in all of these systems, they unfortunately are. Countless numbers of sites store your social security number increasing the risk to it. Getting a new number can be very difficult, not just the process of getting the new number but also updating everyplace that has it.

What happens if all of the social security numbers get breached? With under 400 million people in the united states how long will it take with all of these breaches for all numbers to have been breached? I know, we could just create all of the numbers that fit the format of xxx-xx-xxxx, but I am talking number with other identifying information. If all of the numbers get breached, what do we do next? Is it still worth spending so much money trying to protect them in our systems? We can’t get people to encrypt them now, will they continue to do it when they are all in the public domain? Do we finally start moving to a new identifier, albeit probably too late? Maybe it is just a money ticket for identity monitoring and credit monitoring companies. Will the duty to protect this information be removed when it is public domain? As we have seen with other breaches, once something is in public domain, no matter how it got there, it is fair game. It raises an interesting situation when a finite set of data is at risk. Do you know what your company is doing to protect this type of information? Better yet, as a consumer, do you have any concern about your SSN being stolen? Chances are very good it is already out there somewhere.

1.2 Billion Passwords… Password Best Practices Again

There is a lot of talk about the recent discovery of what appears to be about 1.2 billion username and passwords stolen. I haven’t seen the list, so I can’t confirm that, but let’s assume it is accurate. Is this something we should be panicking about?

The first question is how many unique people does this actually effect? The chances that it effects 1.2 billion people seems pretty. I haven’t seen any statistics generated but we have to assume that those people that are connected to the internet have more than one user account. The breach says the credentials were pilfered from more than 450,000 sites. Of course that information is not being released, and we don’t need it to protect ourselves.

Practice Good Password Practices

With all the recent breach coverage we can’t help but to continue preaching good password practices. You may ask if it really matters with all the breaches that occur, or what control you really have. It is not like these passwords are stolen from you, the application that stores them is usually the culprit.

As those that create and rely on passwords, we do want to help take care of them as best we can. I can’t control what the developer is doing to protect the password on their end, so I have to assume the worst and do the best I can on my end. At some point, I think we will start to see people actually stop using applications that are not proactively protecting our data, but to do that we need applications that are transparent and show us they are doing things right to gain our business.

Choosing Strong Passwords
We should start off by choosing strong passwords. Unfortunately, a lot of critical applications still don’t support strong enough passwords, but if you can, try to have at least 15 characters in the password. When it comes to password strength it is the length that has the greatest effect. Remember, it is rare that someone is trying to guess Your password, rather they are running software tools to crack large swaths of passwords. I prefer to use pass phrases or sentences to create my password. This makes it easier to remember and more difficult to crack.

Changing Passwords Regularly
Changing your password to critical systems regularly can help avoid your password from being stolen by malicious users. Many corporate systems require password changes every 45-90 days for end users. You should follow that guideline too for personal applications, especially the ones that focus on financial artifacts (such as your bank accounts). Lets hope that a company that has been breached and lost passwords isn’t losing them day after day. We hope it was a one or two time thing. By changing our passwords regularly it increases the chance that the breached data is no longer valid by the time it gets used.

Don’t Reuse Passwords
It is recommended to not use the same password on multiple sites. I understand that this is a pain point because it is difficult to remember that many passwords. Try a password manager, a piece of software to store all your passwords securely, to help solve that problem. The issue with re-using passwords is that many sites allow you to use the same username, or just your email address as the user name. Once your data has been stolen from one application, an attacker may try that password on another site where you use those same credentials. This also includes not using similar passwords. Using passwords like Summer2014 and Fall2014 are not a good idea because if these are identified, it is simple to figure out the pattern and guess the next password in line. This is critical if you do change your password regularly, and an older password got breached.

2 Factor Authentication
If a site offers 2-factor authentication, enable it. Two factor authentication means that the site will prompt you for your username and password and then a secondary piece of information. For example, my bank will send me a token via email that I have to enter. This token is different every time I log in. Many sites are starting to support tools like Google Authenticator, which is an app that runs on your mobile device and provides that 2nd piece of authentication. If you are using sites that do not support 2 factor authentication, write to them and request it. Remember, they are storing your data, you want it protected.

Validate the Hype

When news like this breaks, we often have a tendency to really overreact thinking that it is the end of the world. Credentials got stolen, we are not disputing that, but lets step back and think about what that means. Keep in mind that in this announcement, applications or companies were not named. At this point, it is possible the credentials are for meaningless sites that are not that big of a deal. Due to the nature of the accounts being used to send spam I am guessing many are probably email accounts, but that is just a guess. What has happened in the past can’t really be changed. We change our passwords, we monitor our accounts (like we should be anyway) and we continue reaping the benefits that these applications provide us.

Stay safe, and keep your eyes open.