Alleged Massive Account and Password Seizure By Russian Group

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday August 6, 2014 @02:02AM from the security-through-well-everyone-else-is-compromised-too dept.

New submitter Rigodi (1000552) writes "The New York Times reported on August 5th that a massive collection of stolen email passwords and website accounts have been accumulated by an alleged Russian "crime ring". Over 1.2 billion accounts were compromised ... the attack scheme is essentially the old and well known SQL injection tactic using a botnet. The Information has been made public to coincide with the Blackhat conference to cause a debate about the classic security account and password system weaknesses, urging the industry to find new ways to perform authentication. What do Black Hat security conference participants have to say about that in Vegas?

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Stored in cleartext? by MoonlessNights · 2014-08-06 02:52 · Score: 5, Insightful

How was this even possible? Passwords should NEVER be something you can steal since they shouldn't actually be stored as clear text (or even encrypted, for that matter).
Hasn't it been common practice, for at least a decade, to store the passwords as a salted hash (using a unique salt for each user)?
You shouldn't be able to steal a password since the site shouldn't have it.