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Hack Exposes 412 Million Accounts on AdultFriendFinder Sites (zdnet.com)

"Almost every account password was cracked, thanks to the company's poor security practices," reports ZDNet -- even for "deleted" accounts. An anonymous reader quotes their article: The hack includes 339 million accounts from AdultFriendFinder.com, which the company describes as the "world's largest sex and swinger community [and] also includes over 15 million "deleted" accounts that weren't purged from the databases. On top of that, 62 million accounts from Cams.com, and 7 million from Penthouse.com were stolen, as well as a few million from other smaller properties owned by the company. The data accounts for two decades' worth of data from the company's largest sites, according to breach notification LeakedSource, which obtained the data... The three largest site's SQL databases included usernames, email addresses, and the date of the last visit, and passwords, which were either stored in plaintext or scrambled with the SHA-1 hash function, which by modern standards isn't cryptographically as secure as newer algorithms.
The attack apparently coincides with the discovery of "a local file inclusion flaw on the AdultFriendFinder site, which if successfully exploited could allow an attacker to remotely run malicious code on the web server. " Ironically, Friend Finder Networks doesn't even own Penthouse.com anymore. They sold the site to a new owner last February.

2 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Never hacked, not recommended. SHA-2 better by raymorris · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are no known SHA-1 collisions. Essentially, it's never been fully hacked. As you mentioned any hash must be salted for password use, and salted SHA-1 would be fine for most any public web site.

    However, a partial crack of SHA-1 exists. The NSA or the Chinese government might well be able to crack it.

    SHA-2 is recommended for all new hashes. For example, new TLS (SSL) certificates are signed with SHA-2, not SHA-1. In 2017, major browsers may stop accepting TLS certificates signed with SHA-1.

    Upgrading can be easy if you used the crypt() system call, or a higher-level function that calls crypt() underneath. That includes MySQL encrypt(), Perl crypt(), etc. If you do, just change the salt you use for the initial hashing - the password CHECKING code remains unchanged.

  2. Amount of women I fucked from AFF. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Three. One even became my girlfriend for two years. So there are real women on there.