Account and INFO Security

Here is a great how to video on hacking password hashes. Note that he doesn’t need your password. He needs the hash, which he can get from a breach.

There are many people who say that they don’t trust some version of online business, whether it be passwords, password wallets, or some other version of encryption security. They claim that by keeping their passwords on paper, that this is a higher level of security than storing it on their computer. They are right, and they are wrong. The answer to this lies in the way that encryption works. I am greatly simplifying this, so it will be a bit easier to understand.

All digital encryption works using the same basic principles. Digital encryption is simply a very complex math problem where there is a formula that permits only one answer to a problem posed by the number that is put into it, the password. The output that results from the password being run through the algorithm is called the hash. There can only be one hash for each password. Password hashing is typical on the server side when the server operators don’t need to know the plaintext password, they just need to demonstrate that the user knows the plaintext.

A common hash function is Message-digest algorithm 5 (MD5), which takes a message of any length as input and converts it to an output of a fixed 128-bit hash value length to be used for authenticating the original message. Here are a few examples of what a hash looks like:

md5(helloworld) = fc5e038d38a57032085441e7fe7010b0
md5(hell0world) = 0a123b92f789055b946659e816834465
md5(g84js;l238fl-242ldfsosd98234) = 42e7862f4ad5225471866d2023fc4cca#
md5(helloworld) = fc5e038d38a57032085441e7fe7010b0

When you enter your password into a website, it is converted into a hash. If the hash matches the one that is on file, the website grants you access.

Small changes matter a lot – Take a look at examples 1 and 2. Just one digit has been shifted, from an “o” to a “0.” This is a very small change, and yet the second output is unrecognizable from the first.

The output length never changes – The input in example 3 is considerably longer than the other examples, yet it produces an output of the same length (32 characters). You could input an entire book into the md5() hash function and you would still get a 32-character string as the output.

Repeatable – An input will always give the same output when hashed using the same function. If this weren’t the case, they would just be generating a random output, which would be useless for passwords. (I included the same function in example 1 as example 4 just to see if you were paying attention.)

Knowing that hashes are the same length regardless of the password you choose, you might be tempted to pick a short, memorable password. In fact, you should do the opposite. The password you choose is critical for keeping your data secure. Why is that?

MD5 isn’t the only hashing algorithm. There are others, like the SHA-2 hash code family, one widely used today, with algorithms that are longer and harder to break. The names of SHA-2 algorithms are connected to length, so SHA-224 represents 224 bits in length. The same format works for SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512. The more bits in the hash, the more complex and difficult it is to break, and the longer an input password that can be used.

If a website is hacked, cybercriminals don’t get access to your password. Instead, they just get access to the encrypted hash created by your password. It’s impossible to reverse a hash function, so trying millions of combinations to try and produce the same hash (a brute-force attack) is the way that hackers have been attacking passwords.

So that’s what they do. They breach a website because they want the hashes. Banks, Home Depot, Amazon, all of the breaches that you hear of where passwords are compromised, that’s what they are after. That’s what happened to LastPass, as well. They got the password wallets, which included the hashes for the master passwords.

Once a cybercriminal obtains password hashes from a website, the real process of password hacking begins. This process happens offline, on the cybercriminal’s computer. Cybercriminals put combinations of characters into a hashing function until a hash that matches yours is created.

Because the functions themselves are well known, password cybercriminals can easily calculate hashes for known words and other commonly chosen combinations. Then they scan for known hashes using commercially available cracking tools. These dictionaries go far beyond simple words. They include prefixes, suffixes, the practice of changing letters for numbers (e.g. 1 instead of l), and much more. This means weak passwords can be broken very quickly. Humans suck at random. That’s why human created passwords are garbage.

A long password is better, because it takes more to guess a long password than a short one. A random one is better, because this foils dictionary attacks. Not reusing passwords is a way to keep a hash found on one website from being matched with others.

• 69% of people admit to sharing some passwords with others
• 71% of people admit to using common passwords like p@ssw0rd, their pets’ names, or children’s birthdays
• 72% of people admit to reusing the same password on 4 or more accounts
• 56% of people claim that they would not use passwords at all if they could
• The average user has 25 online accounts but uses just 6.5 passwords to protect them

So why does all of this matter? If you write your passwords on a piece of paper and then burn the paper, no one will ever get the passwords, but the hackers don’t care. They want the hash so they can brute force your passwords. It doesn’t matter if YOU use electronic password storage, because any company that you do business with does, but in the form of hashes. Using a password notebook like this one keeps the password out of electronics, but that doesn’t secure the hash.

Remember that a password cracking tool uses different methods to attack a hash. It will guess common passwords, and paired with a handful of inexpensive GPUs, can make 88 billion guesses per second. In fact, one hacker has a 25 GPU server that guesses 350 billion passwords per second. Ten years ago, a white hat used a GPU driven machine to crack 90 percent of the 6.5 million password hashes belonging to users of LinkedIn in less than six days. Computers and their cracking software are considerably faster today.

They are so fast, that number-only passwords are useless. Even if you choose a good combination of letters, numbers, and special characters, passwords of eleven characters or less will be brute forced before a company even notifies the public of the breach. A series of leaks over the past few years containing 100 million passwords have given hackers dictionaries of passwords from people in different walks of life. The ever-growing list of leaked passwords allows programmers to write rules that make cracking algorithms faster and more accurate; password attacks have become cut-and-paste exercises that even script kiddies can perform with ease.

That’s why I was so pissed at LastPass for not disclosing the breach for months. How long is your password, what does it consist of, and how would it fare if the black hats had the hash to play with for 3 or 4 months? What if the black hat uses more than one computer?

That’s why, for now, I recommend that you use a randomly generated password comprised of numerals, special characters, uppercase, and lowercase letters, and your password should be no fewer than 17 characters long. Do not use words, even with common misspellings. Dictionary attacks live on words like p@ssw0rD123.

Diceware has a flaw in that it is susceptible to dictionary attacks. There are only 7,776 words in the diceware word list. Using that list to generate 4 words results in 3.6 quadrillion possible word combinations. That’s a lot for a human to guess, but a trivial exercise for a computer making a few billion guesses per second. If no other randomness is inserted, a 4 word password generated by diceware would be cracked in less than 3 hours. There was a time when diceware was a good idea, but increases in computing technology have made it useless.

That same technology makes other schemes just as useless: fingerprints, facial recognition, and others. A strong, random password and a hardware key are currently the only secure methods for identifying valid, authorized users.

There are new hashing algorithms that complicate the process of cracking, like SHA512, Bcrypt, or PBKDF2. The complexity of the math involved limits the speed of those cracking computers to less than a 10,000 guesses per second, which greatly increases security. However, it costs money for a business to stay current with this kind of technology, and many companies just aren’t willing to spend the cash. That means it is up to YOU to keep your password long and complicated.

Don’t be complacent. There was a time when an 8 character password was nearly impervious to attack.

Earlier in the year, I was talking about using a password manager to secure your passwords. I have been using LastPass for the past 8 years. As I discussed previously, LastPass had a security breach last summer. That breach involved the exposure and loss of their customer database. This handed the black hats all of the encrypted data of their customers. It was simply a matter of time before the bad guys used password cracking tools to decrypt customer password files.

So I did the sensible thing and changed all of my passwords, beginning with the most sensitive ones: email passwords, passwords to financial websites, and on down the list to the least important. It took several weeks to change hundreds of unique passwords. I also changed the master password. The next step that I took was to add MFA by using Yubikey. All of my data is now secure, and anything they have is no longer relevant.

I don’t blame LastPass for the fact that they had a breach. Everyone is a target, and a company like LastPass is a bigger target than most. No, what made me upset was that the breach happened in August, but they didn’t disclose it until November. They denied that the bad guys had gotten encrypted password wallets at first, then finally admitted in December that the password wallets had been lost. So the bad guys had our vaults for months before LastPass bothered to tell anyone. Months to brute force passwords, time to steal, and time is all they need.

They still are slowly releasing information in dribs and drabs. It comes out that the database was stolen because one of their engineers was permitted to have access to the servers from his home computer. That computer was compromised, which allowed the hackers to access corporate information. Now, password vaults are all encrypted and no one but the user has access, but still. Who does this? Home access to sensitive information? There is also the fact that they hid this information for over 9 months. That’s just too shady for me.

I didn’t want to change from LastPass, but this is the last straw. They just are not trustworthy. This isn’t the time to be cute and try to spin this from a PR perspective. This is a much bigger deal than just bad publicity. People’s information that YOU are supposed to safeguard is at stake. I no longer recommend LastPass as a viable password vault application.

LastPass is no longer for me, and it shouldn’t be for you, either. I want cloud storage of my passwords, because it allows portability between laptop, cell phone, etc. So I switched my password wallet over to 1password. The cost is $60 a year for the family plan, which allows up to 5 people to use the account. 1password is also compatible with Yubikey.

Your master password in a password wallet is the one that is used to encrypt the digital vault that stores your passwords. It may be your PGP passphrase, if you are old school enough to be using that software. Whatever your reason, a strong password is important. My master password is not actually a word. I use pass phrases. Let me explain: Suppose that I pick a mashup of the opening to the Gettysburg address and a nursery rhyme:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow

The master password is made by mashing it into numbers, letters, and symbols. Words that are numbers become numbers, that are symbols become symbols, the remaining words, I just use the first letter, like this:

4 s & 7 y a, o f b f o t c a n n, M h a l l, i f w w a s

Now take out the spaces, and your new master password is: “4s&7ya,ofbfotcann,Mhallifwwas” It’s easy to remember, nearly impossible to guess, and at 29 characters is very difficult to brute force. This password is also guaranteed not to be on a list of common passwords that many black hats use to guess passwords. A long, difficult to crack master password buys you time to make the data it is protecting obsolete. That’s what I did. All of my master passwords are AT LEAST 25 characters long.

The black hats are large in number, and stealing personal data is the new currency. Make yourself as difficult a target as possible.

Our phones ARE spying on us

The gun sales site Gunauction.com has had its database breached. The data exposed belonged to 550,000 users, including customers’ full names, home addresses, email addresses, plaintext passwords, and telephone numbers.

My advice is that you make sure that you change your passwords for that site using password best practices.

Just as we have always suspected, we now have solid evidence that your cell phone is spying on you and forwarding your information to the ChiComs. Again, it doesn’t matter how careful you are, there are security leaks. It may be on your end, it may be on the other end, but it is inevitable that there are ways for black hats to gain access to your stuff.

I know that there are some out there who think they are more clever than the other side, but is everyone you do business with just as smart? What about their employees? Your phone? The government employees handling your information?

How much of your stuff is being read, unbeknownst to you? I assume that governments with their unlimited resources can see whatever they want, no matter how hard I try to secure it. I just want to make my stuff harder to steal than most people’s, so maybe the thieves spend their time on the lower hanging fruit.

As apps that do all of the heavy lifting for you become more widespread, the threats to your accounts become more pronounced. This software allows even amateurs to get into the cybercrime business. The software and the scams are becoming ever more sophisticated, with some of them catching even the most wary people.

As one business owner found out when he lost more than $120k, these guys are getting pretty good at suckering people in. Thinking that you are smarter or that you can’t possibly be fooled is a mistake.

He received a call from a person claiming to be from the Chase fraud department and asking to verify a suspicious transaction.

The 800-number matched Chase customer service so Mullenaux didn’t think it was suspicious when the person asked him to log into his account via a secured link sent by text message for identification purposes. The link looked legitimate and the website that opened appeared identical to his Chase banking app, so he logged in.

Thinking about this now and preparing a security plan is the best way to defend yourself. In this case, a password manager would have known the site wasn’t legit, and would not have filled in his credentials. That may have been the red flag he needed to realize he was being suckered. Most of us know that we shouldn’t give our credentials to someone who contacts us, but this new breed of con man is using a combination of misdirection and deceit to trick us into letting our guards down. Using computer tools to aid us in spotting fake login sites is the way to go, IMO.

Just when you think you are done talking about information security for awhile, the bad actors come along and prove you wrong. The latest is that black hats are targeting users of valuable sites with phishing ad and search engine results on Google and other search engines. The scam is that you search for your favorite website’s login, and the first hit is a phishing site that grabs your login information before forwarding you to the legit site.

In this case, it is users of the password manager “Bitwarden” and 1password that are the targets, but I have seen reports of similar attacks with other password managers, banking sites, and others. Recent research has shown that threat actors are using Google ads to fuel their malware delivery campaigns for initial access to corporate networks, to steal credentials, and for phishing attacks.

What’s interesting to me is that Google, YouTube, and other sites are busy clamping down on reports of the 2020 election, COVID vaccines, and everything else under the sun, but are actively allowing ads on their sites that are actual theft.

The best defense to this is the use of MFA that uses FIDO 2.0 or higher. The article that I linked to above says that hardware keys are cumbersome, but I have thus far found them easy to use, and certainly no more difficult than the authenticator apps that are out there. Another thing the article gets wrong is that all MFA is subject to “man in the middle” attacks. That may be true of authenticator and SMS versions of MFA, but the YubiKey system is not subject to man in the middle attacks, because the system uses the two keys of public key encryption to ensure that both parties are legitimate. I am sure that other hardware keys are available that do the same thing, I just have no experience with them.

You will note that Microsoft warned of this back in July and recommended the use of FIDO (Fast ID Online) 2.0 protocols for MFA. This rules out many authenticator apps as well as SMS methods of MFA. Note that the YubiKey 5 uses FIDO 2.0.

Be very, very wary of the websites that you are using. The crooks are getting more and more inventive every day.

In the latest of the data breaches, T Mobile reports that 37 million customers had their names, billing addresses, emails, phone numbers, dates of birth, T-Mobile account numbers and information describing the kind of service they have with the wireless carrier stolen in a data breach. T-Mobile claims that no social security numbers, credit card information, government ID numbers, passwords, PINs or financial information were exposed.

PayPal also had a data breach of 35,000 customer files. Names, dates of birth, addresses, Social Security numbers, tax IDs and phone numbers were all exposed. The accounts were breached using a credential stuffing attack, likely using one of these cracking tools. Now I doubt many of my readers use PayPal, considering their antigun stance, but it still illustrates how active hacking is.

Still, I recommend that you change your password if you are a customer of one of these services. Please make sure it’s a secure one.

You have locked your credit reports, haven’t you? Even if you aren’t a T Mobile customer, please do so. I would also recommend that you pull each of your credit reports every year. The law says you can do so, free of charge, every year.