Slashdot Mirror
Disqus Confirms Over 17.5 Million Email Addresses Were Stolen In 2012 Hack of Its Comments Tool (zdnet.com)
Disqus, a company that builds and provides a web-based comment plugin for news websites, said Friday that hackers stole more than 17.5 million email addresses in a data breach in July 2012. "About a third of those accounts contained passwords, salted and hashed using the weak SHA-1 algorithm, which has largely been deprecated in recent years in favor of stronger password scramblers," reports ZDNet. From the report: Some of the exposed user information dates back to 2007. Many of the accounts don't have passwords because they signed up to the commenting tool using a third-party service, like Facebook or Google. The theft was only discovered this week after the database was sent to Troy Hunt, who runs data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned, who then informed Disqus of the breach. The company said in a blog post, posted less than a day after Hunt's private disclosure, that although there was no evidence of unauthorized logins, affected users will be emailed about the breach. Users whose passwords were exposed will have their passwords force-reset. The company warned users who have used their Disqus password on other sites to change the password on those accounts.
I'm really not sure how much I consider an email "breach" all that big a deal. Most people use semi-disposable email anyway, and how is your email address much more secret than your street address? I suppose they could use them in a big data-mining cross-reference deal, but at this point, I'm kind of "so what".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It's Disqus, not disgus.
It's not "Disgus" with a G, it's "Disqus" with a Q. It's a play on "discuss".
Freudian slip?
Yet another one gets hit.
What was the hole this time I wonder.
I wonder how many more upcoming breach announcements we'll have, all hoping to get away with minimal casualties because they aren't as bad as the disasters at Equifax and Yahoo.
Check out "Have I Been Pwned" website. You can enter all your email addresses and get notifications if a particular email address got exposed in a data breach. I've gotten several email in recent days informing me of data breaches at Kickstarter and Pinterest.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/
but this one is mine.
"About a third of those accounts contained passwords, salted and hashed using the weak SHA-1 algorithm, which has largely been deprecated in recent years in favor of stronger password scramblers,"
Sigh. If you're going to pick a quote, pick one that states a meaningful fact. SHA-1's flaw is that it allows a pre-image attack, where an attacker can craft a duplicate message that yields the same hash value as a different message, which is very useful for forging signatures on certificates. But that flaw is utterly useless for more efficiently brute force attacking a password that was hashed with SHA-1.
All the information I gleaned from this quote is that the author doesn't understand what he's talking about, and his writing isn't worth reading. Oh, and that my password on Disqus is still safe.
John
I really don't trust these sites to do a good job... but only allowing google and twitter oauth providers is pathetic
Years ago, I used Yahoo!'s OAuth provider to sign up on lots of sites. That sure kept my accounts secure! :-/
John
Many of those account owners could literally be dead.
The problem with oauth and the like is that they are a bit like keeping all your eggs in one basket. If the auth provider is breached, it is theoretically possible for credentials to be forged. Unlikely, but possible. It's generally better to compartmentalize, so a breach at one place won't make you vulnerable anywhere else.
On the other hand, people really don't like doing passwords in a secure way. It is, admittedly, a real hassle. If you aren't going to do passwords securely, then you're much better off using an auth provider.
AssFux (lol) tell us about your NDA lie and your dns fuckups apk tore you up on please hahahaha https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11188265&cid=55322595/
The USA government simply cannot be trusted.
After their members spent half a decade posting unwittingly with their de-anonymized accounts.
AssFux (lol) tell us about your NDA lie and your dns fuckups apk tore you up on please hahahaha https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11188265&cid=55322595/
AssFux (lol) tell us about your NDA lie and your dns fuckups apk tore you up on please hahahaha https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11188265&cid=55322595/
You are absolutely correct for SHA-1 hashes of random data, of significant length. Passwords, however, are neither random nor long. I'll describe the attack for you and you can try it out yourself. The fact that an ordinary consumer PC can compute SHA-1 password hashes at the rate 10 billion per second is why SHA-1 is no longer appropriate for passwords. Here's how the attack is done:
Download two large lists of passwords, any "combined list" from your favorite haxor site will do. It doesn't matter what sites the passwords are from. If you run a comparison, you'll find that given two lists of a million passwords, about half of the passwords will be on both lists - with different accounts. That is, there is about a 50/50 chance that your password is in the list because somebody else used the same password. You probably know it's not too hard to find lists totaling many millions of passwords (we don't need fresh ones). If we put together a list of 10 million passwords, most of the Disqus passwords will be on our list, because SOMEBODY used the same password (not necessarily the same person).
So we take the first, most common password on our list of previously seen passwords and try it against each of the 17 million hashes from Disqus. Because SHA-1 is so fast, our $100 GPU can check all 17 million hashes in one millisecond. In one second, we can try the top thousand most common passwords. In 24 hours, we can test out 10 MILLION passwords that somebody, somewhere, has used before, and thereby crack perhaps 8 million of the Disqus passwords - which gives us the email addresses to match those passwords.
For passwords, therefore, you need a hash that can't be easily computed at the rate of billions per second with commodity hardware. Bcrypt and scrypt are appropriate choices. To avoid certain problems with particularly long or particularly short passwords, you first take a SHA-2 hash of the password, then scrypt it.*
* In the general case of random data, hashing a hash doesn't add security. Passwords, however are not the general case.
It's also annoying if you close your Google account and those sites are tied to it.
lucm, indeed.
Guess what service I'm glad I never bothered to sign up for.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Disqus is a scam.
A while ago we had a news discussion where we found the following rules for cencorship:
"Putin is an Idiot" is censored.
"Trump is an Idiot" is censored.
"Obama is an Idiot" is NOT censored.
"Merkel is an Idiot" is NOT censored.
So now we got curious, we edited the already posted texts by exchanging the names randomly... at first the "new" anti-Putin comments where up for a couple of minutes puplicly and then got cencored. The "new" Anti-Obama-comments on the other hand where still blocked for a couple of minutes and then became public. So we edited the texts back and voila, a couple of minutes later the censorship strikes again. We continued this on several accounts for a couple of hours then suddenly EVERY edited comment became invisible for a couple of hours(!) until being manually switched public as long as it did not insult putin or trump. Being Greasemonkeys we made sure the texts got edited for another couple of days over and over again, also using new accounts but no way to criticize Putin.
Forum didn't matter, topic didn't matter, it just was not possible to critcise authoritarian politics. After we made this public several news papers stopped using disqus.
Therefor I say: Disqus is a Scam!
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
I have an account too. What should I do? https://williamreview.com/vids...
http://williamreview.com/
Potayto potaughto
...and now 5 years later they notice it? Why are companies like that still allowed to stay in business?
It wouldn't be a big deal... if for not the fact that NOW they are telling us about something that happened FIVE YEARS AGO.
. . . to the latest count of over 3 billion, 240 million invasive hacks since 2012, we how are updated to OVER 3 billion 258 million!
Couldn't happen to a better company. The way they show posts must be one of the most fucked up ways of doing it.
How can they email the affected people when they said that their email addresses were stolen?
disqus is shit, any web site using it is not worth my time.