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LastPass Separates From GoTo 43

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
LastPass, the password manager company, has officially separated from its parent company, GoTo, following a series of high-profile hacks in recent years. The company will now operate under a shareholder holding company called LMI Parent.

LastPass -- owned by private equity firms Francisco Partners and Elliott Management -- has faced criticism for its handling of the breaches, which resulted in the theft of customer data and encryption keys. The company has since enforced a 12-character minimum for master passwords to improve security.
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LastPass Separates From GoTo More

LastPass Separates From GoTo

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  • Wait, encryption keys were stolen? (Score:3)

    by kriston ( 7886 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @11:44AM (#64439096) Homepage Journal

    Wait, encryption keys were stolen? I thought it was only the encrypted data that was stolen, which, for the foreseeable future, is worthless.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, there is password managers and then there is things that pretend to be password managers. LastPass is in the second group.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kriston ( 7886 )

        I beg to differ. Lastpass data is encrypted on the client. There is no way anyone can use the stolen Lastpass data without the encryption key, barring some breakthrough like quantum computing.

        But, still, the fact that the data was stolen more than twice is concerning, but it's a testament to their successful security model for the actual storage of passwords and data.

        • Re:Wait, encryption keys were stolen? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Coopjust ( 872796 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @01:16PM (#64439468)
          LastPass had different encryption levels, including encryption on how they stored it server side. Those keys were stolen. So now you're at the mercy of the strength of the master password, and then the encryption provided by the client.

          PKBDF2 is used to iterate password attempts to attempt bruteforcing. Over time, as computing power has increased, the number of PKBDF2 iterations needed to effectively deter bruteforcing has increased. As of Feb 2023, that recommendation was 600K iterations of PKBDF2 with SHA-256. LastPass did 101K - on newer accounts. It originally started at one. In June of 2012, they increased it to 500, and in June of 2013, to 5,000 iterations. The recommended minimum iteration count as was 1000 in 2011 by security experts. July of 2018 they increased it to 101,000 - but despite saying they would retroactively increase older accounts, they never did, at least not consistently.

          Compounded with the fact that the genius designers at LastPass did not consider the URI to be sensitive info, huge for data breaches. The account email was unencrypted (had to be), so when combined that vault for coopjust@example.org has a login for say, the website of a particular financial institution - that becomes tremendously useful for either attempting bruteforcing of other password leaks (credential stuffing lists), to use in tandem with other data leaks (address, phone) for social engineering, or to decide if there's so many juicy sites like cryptocurrency exchanges that it may be worth using distributed computing to crack a vault. Indeed, LastPass users had their crypto keys stolen after the breach [cybernews.com].

          With the average password having only 40 bits of entropy, the time to crack a 500 entropy password vault would be less than $750 in computing time these days (Wladimir Palant has an excellent writeup on the entire breach [palant.info]). When enhanced by the unencrypted URIs making it obvious which vaults may be more worthy of attack for that computing effort (combination of sites and how weak the PKBDF2 setting was), then unscrupulous people can selectively target what they want to bruteforce.

          The entire thing is a trainwreck, LastPass has consistently fucked up from a security perspective, and should be utterly discarded as a company worth trying. The whole thing started in terms of the breach in them allowing a critical engineer to just log into his work VPN/servers from a non-corporate owned home PC running an outdated version of Plex. Their security promises are hollow and illusory. Run, don't walk.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            I always thought that the idea of the client being a browser extension was a terrible idea too. If it's a separate app then at least it's outside the browser processes. In fact when Lastpass got started, Firefox was still single process and using the extremely insecure old plug-in system, and Google Chrome was brand new.

        • No, not "Lastpass data", only "Lastpass passwords" are encrypted or were at the time of the latest breach. Most or everything else, including notes like URLs to authentication pages, are or were not, opening the doors wide for intruders to see where it might be worth to set brute force attacks going even if they couldn't get the actual passwords. And that is about the opposite of a "successful security model" except if you'd see success as getting the most money for the cheapest job.

    • If I remember correctly, encryption keys for "secure notes" were stolen, and some people stored backup keys for crypto wallets in those notes; those wallets were drained. I do not believe the issue affects password storage or other areas besides "secure notes."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kriston ( 7886 )

        That's weird because "secure notes" are stored under the very same encryption keys that are used to secure the entire Lastpass Vault.

        I feel like this journalist is mistaken.

        • Re: Wait, encryption keys were stolen? (Score:4)

          by Midnight_Falcon ( 2432802 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @12:21PM (#64439250)
          I am not a journalist, I'm someone who responded to this incident across numerous environments. One of the journalists converting it is Brian Krebs, who is rarely wrong: https://krebsonsecurity.com/20... [krebsonsecurity.com]

        • Re:Wait, encryption keys were stolen? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Coopjust ( 872796 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @01:44PM (#64439582)
          Lastpass kept anemic settings for the encryption level for years - only iterating to 500 (from one) PBKDF2 iterations from 1 in mid-2012, and to 5000 in 2013. In mid-2018 LastPass increased that to 101,000 iterations which was considered the minimum standard for security at the time - but many older accounts were not actually migrated to the newer iteration count (despite LastPass claiming they would be).

          Combine that with LastPass' minimum password strength requirement only being 8 characters prior to the breach and you have a recipe for bruteforcing.

          Even if you don't blame LastPass on people having weaker master passwords than they should (which if the point of client side encryption is that it does, your password manager should enforce a reasonably secure minimum standard), the lack of continuing PKBDF2 iterations left many accounts with stronger master passwords subject to bruteforcing. When combined with the fact that URIs were left unencrypted for vault items, it created a recipe for disaster in terms of bad actors knowing which vaults were likely to contain valuable credentials.
    • lol correct horse battery staple

  • Migrate from LastPass (Score:4, Informative)

    by Midnight_Falcon ( 2432802 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @11:47AM (#64439110)
    If you haven't already, it's been long time to migrate from LastPass. They are owned by an investment firm that sued the country of Argentina for 15 years, and won, and got their money. [npr.org] The strategy they are employing is simply to extract as much value as possible from existing customers. So, 1Password, DashLane etc have never looked better as companies that actually care about customers and their future.

    I lament how this may cause some to go back into the stone age with memorized-passwords rather than use a password manager. Password managers, by and large, are far more secure for the average user than the alternatives -- provided they're properly used. This means no reusing passwords on multiple sites, which is the #1 way people and companies get hacked.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      I used to use and advocate LogMeIn until they priced home lab users out of their price range.

      As an aside, I now use and advocate Splashtop and RemotePC instead of LogMeIn or whatever they're calling it now.

    • how is suing Argentina and winning evidence of failure as a password manager? Having lived and worked in Argentina in the distant past, I believe that the level of corruption there is insane, compared to the USA. Or, maybe they are just more up front about it?
      • It means it's a ruthless investment company willing to cause country-level problems to make a buck. Do you think your security is more important to them than the welfare of Argentinians? They don't care about human suffering, just making money however possible.
        • That’s describing pretty much every publicly traded company.
          • It gets an order of magnitude shadier and more brutal when you're mega-wealthy and fully private like Elliott. I mean, just look at the Trump Organization...
            • true story. I once had a wealthy friend. He wanted to take a distribution from one of his accounts. He was counseled by the company (Schwab or some onther one, I do not recall) that he should have taken the distribution the month prior as he would then have had to pay less in taxes for some arcane reason. He told them that he hadn't known he would need the distribution at that time. Their response? Well, we will just back date that for you so you save a few thousand in taxes... and then they did!

        • You mean the fiscally mismanaged country willing to repeatedly issue bonds and within only a few years decide to make them worthless, attempting to force bond holders into a pennies-on-the-dollar deal multiple times, only to reissue new bonds and do the same thing over again?

          Argentina deserves just as much fault in that series of events.

  • Edgar Dijkstra would be spinning in his grave if he was dead.

  • The company immediately entered the failure category for me once LogMeIn bought them.

    They ruin everything they touch.
    Doubling pricing year over year while at the same time they stop investing in the product is their guiding principle.

    And while the passwords stored was encrypted, some metadata was available in the stolen data with minimal encoding indicating the website addresses stored. Often those website URL contain sensitive info and it also indicates to the hacker if the data is worth investing in
  • Use Bitwarden, Keeper, or PasswordSafe. Problem solved.

    • Or use keepassxc + keepassdroid with a webdav share to host a kdbx, backed by a second factors with yubikeys (nano and nfc), Booth offer great integration matching Lastpass' extensions, and the android/keyboard add-ons bridge any gaps. I just mount a davfs share to point the database file and everything just works.
      I'd trust that over any stack hosted by a third party.

  • Why would you use Lastpass when things like Bitwarden and ProtonPass etc exist?

  • > following a series of high-profile hacks in recent years

    Why is Lastpass storing your unencrypted passwords on a server?

  • Because that's where the money is.

    Increasing password length to 100 characters wouldn't help if the hackers are stealing directly from LastPass.+

  • LastPass Separates From GoTo

    Granted, this GoTo might not be as risky [xkcd.com] as others, but why chance it.

  • Once your password manager is hacked, it's hacked. You can no longer make claims about security, robustness, and other avenues. Last Pass was a good password manager, I used it for a few years many years ago, but once it changed into a profit seeking tool, all bets were off.

    One year they wanted to charge me ~$30, when they had a deal that US customers could pay ~$3. They refused to match the offer, and insisted I either pay, or, they'd take my “Family Account” away. A week later I was on

  • they will now be called Lastgasp.

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