2.5 Million Xbox and PlayStation Gamers' Details Have Been Leaked From Piracy Forums (thenextweb.com)

Xbox360ISO.com and PSPISO.com have been hacked by an unknown attacker in late 2015 and the details of the 2.5 million users affected have been leaked online. The leaked information contains email addresses, IP addresses, usernames and passwords. The Next Web reports: It seems that the operator of these sites did nothing to protect the latter, as all passwords were "protected" using the MD5 hashing system, which is trivially easy to overcome. For reference, that's the same hashing system used by LinkedIn. As the names of these sites imply, they were used to share pirated copies of games for Microsoft and Sony's gaming platforms. They also both have a thriving community where people discussed a variety of tech-related topics, including gaming news and software development. If you think you might have had an account on these sites at one point, and want to check if you were affected, you can visit Troy Hunt's Have I Been Pwned. If you have, it's worth emphasizing that anyone who gained access to that site, and anyone who has since downloaded the data dump, will be able to discern your password. If you've used it on another website or platform, you should change it.

Comments

Not a surprise

[gweihir]

The number of times I have had to explain to customers how to do password storage right is staggering. Most still believe a single hash is enough (well, to be fair, for a high-entropy password it is). Some have at least heard of salting the hash. But as soon as you come to iteration, most are clueless, and if you put in things like a large-memory-property (to prevent brute-forcing by FPGAs and graphics-cards), you have lost them completely. Many people just stop learning when there is no direct need to and these are the same people that in many cases write security-critical software.

On the other hand, PBKDF2 has been available since 2000, packing hashing, iteration and salting in a nice package. And Argon2 now adds large memory and other nice properties and essentially solves the problem. People just seem to be completely unaware of this.