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T-Mobile Stores Part of Customers' Passwords In Plaintext, Says It Has 'Amazingly Good' Security (vice.com)
T-Mobile Austria admitted on Twitter that it stores at least part of their customer's passwords in plaintext. What this means is that "if anyone breaches T-Mobile (it's only a matter of time), they could likely guess or brute-force every user's password," reports Motherboard. "If the passwords were fully encrypted or hashed, it wouldn't be that easy. But having a portion of the credential in plaintext reduces the difficulty of decoding the hashed part and obtaining the whole password." From the report: "Based on what we know about how people choose their passwords," Per Thorsheim, the founder of the first-ever conference dedicated to passwords, told me via Twitter direct message, "knowing the first 4 characters of your password can make it DEAD EASY for an attacker to figure out the rest." T-Mobile doesn't see that as a problem because it has "amazingly good security." On Thursday, a T-Mobile Austria customer support employee made that stunning revelation in an incredibly nonchalant tweet. Twitter user Claudia Pellegrino was quick to point out that storing passwords in plaintext is wrong, but another T-Mobile customer rep didn't see it that way. "I really do not get why this is a problem. You have so many passwords for every app, for every mail-account and so on. We secure all data very carefully, so there is not a thing to fear," the rep wrote back.
Why would you store the first four characters of every password? Obviously, it is a serious security hole but what possible use is having four letters of a password for the company itself?
I think some (Russian) crackers might take this as a challenge.
T-Mo have had problems with number hijacking/SIM-re-issue, malicious porting out of numbers to other networks, and now I find that they're storing passwords partially in plain text?
What the actual F, T-Mobile?!
I feel like an entire conference dedicated to passwords is maybe a little too specialized. Apparently enough people disagree with me, though. I wonder what kind of research they are doing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
knowing the first 4 characters of your password can make it DEAD EASY for an attacker to figure out the rest.
Assuming the password database is leaked and someone wants to crack *just yours* I suppose they'll get it faster.
But if you used a good password it won't happen for a long time and by then hopefully you will have been alerted to the leak.
Front line reps clueless, news at eleven. Maybe they use the first four for phone identity verification?
Reading between the lines, it sounds like they store the entire password in plain text.
Now, it might be that the agent doesn't understand that passwords aren't normally stored in plain text. You don't "need" to store passwords in order for users to log-in with their password. But that's hard for non-technical people to understand.
They had to go out of their way if they've stored the first four characters in plain text! They'd need an additional attribute in a database table just for that, and I just can't imagine this happening without every developer within shouting distance noticing and objecting. There would have to be a very good reason, and there would have to have been a great deal of discussion and justification.
I would love to hear the "why" if this is actually the case.
You don't need the password in plain-text to deal with lost passwords. You have a protocol for the customer to prove their identity, and then you provide a way to reset the password - whether directly by the customer or manually be a customer service rep.
Please, every T-Mobile customer: please change your password RIGHT NOW to f*** + 12 random characters!
I sear every bank has some characters you can't use in a password and/or an unreasonably short maximum length, leading me to believe that there are far too many sites that either store in plaintext or have other glaring security flaws like not escaping user input.
It's weird, I mean, it's like 3 lines of C# (and probably many other languages) to convert a string to a secure Pbkdf2 hash. Add some bounds checking and other DB nonsense (for a whole separate DB column for the password parts presumably?) and their approach is even more complex to implement. I'm sure someone could do it all in one line, the point is it's not hard to do it right, it's not like they saved hundreds of man-hours. It's like no one even cared.
It's not the same. And I wish they wouldn't call it a password.
Many banks offer an additional level of protection, by allowing you to add a "password" to your account that you will be required to recite when contacting them by phone or doing business in an office.
It has nothing to do with your online account password.
Obviously, in order for the teller to verify it, they have to be able to see it.
Maybe T-Mobile used the first 4 characters of your login password for this purpose. If they did, it is BIZARRE and stupid!
You might argue that the "teller password" is an even worse practice. But this is supposed to be used only after they've already verified picture ID (at least in branch). On the phone, there still will be the usual verification steps before they ask for the password.
My first four letters are "pass"... And I bet you already guessed wrong what my 8-character password is! Its really "passmark", because I love benchmarking so much.
Is that they force you to sign up to a pointless account in the first place. There's a phone number, device ID, and a sim card. Why is this necessary? I'm prepay, and everything was fine without the idiotic accounts.
T-Mobile doesn't see that as a problem because it has "amazingly good security."
Only a few months ago T-Mobile's websites had a major security hole allowing hackers to access all kinds of information about users:
https://www.engadget.com/2017/...
T-Mobile is now a prime hacker target.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
There have been a string of security screwups from T-Mobile. From severe bugs to straight up data theft.
https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/02/23/2118227/critical-t-mobile-bug-allowed-hackers-to-hijack-users-accounts
https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/11/t-mobile-website-flaw-social-engineering-hacks/
A quick search for "T-Mobile data leak" provided numerous results to several instances. If this is their idea of "amazingly good" then yeah, I guess it is. After all "amazingly good" isn't exactly an empirical measure, it's sitting right in the middle of subjectivity. There are a lot of adjectives that are better than "amazingly" or "good", and maybe "amazingly good" is how they choose word the description of the their level of terrible security.
There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
Despite giving them instructions that all orders should use the password I selected, T-Mobile allowed some tweaker that stole my phone info out of my car to call their phone payment system and make 11 approximately 11 dollar payments to my account, each with a different stolen credit card number, presumably to test the numbers and see if they had been deactivated yet. I immediately called T-Mobile to inform them there had been a mistake, and other people's money had been deposited to my account, and they should reverse the transactions. They're response? "We can't do anything about those transactions until the card owner complains to us, and we can't even tell you any information about the accounts used for the payments because of privacy!" Seriously??? Of course, as the card holders noticed the fraudulent transactions, T-Mobile started fining me $35 for each transaction that didn't go through, then insisted that all payments be made IN CASH in person at a T-Mobile store since they couldn't trust me after all those payments I made didn't go through! That was after their customer support insisted the problem was with my bank and I needed to clear it up with my bank despite my repeatedly telling him none of the bad transactions were made from my account. He then made a note on my account saying "customer refused to cooperate" and hung up on me. So I switched to AT&T.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Now that we know they store the first 4 characters in plaintext, we can work around this easily enough. Simply put 1234 at the start of whatever password you want to use, and you'll have the same security as you would without the idiocy or the 1234.