Use the “passwords” feature to check if one of yours is compromised. If it shows up, never ever reuse those credentials. They’ll be baked into thousands of botnets etc. and be forevermore part of automated break-in attempts until one randomly succeeds.
Protip for the room: Use a password manager with a unique password for every service. Then when one leaks, it only affects that singular service, not large swaths of your digital life.
And an email alias.
I hate how many places don’t allow for + aliases. I want to know who leaked my email.
I use my own domain with a catchall, works like a charm
At the same time, it is trivially easy to strip a + alias, so I’d not trust it to do anything much at all.
If you use aliases for all services, it makes it slightly harder to automate trying one leaked email on another site, since the hacker needs to add the new alias on the other service.
No one is going through of all these credentials manually, so any extra obscurity can actually bring you security in a pinch. Although if you have different passwords this shouldn’t matter much…
No, you just run a simple Regex on both combolists and are done. It literally takes seconds
Even if your alias is leaked they can remove the + part and it’ll lead to your original email without aliases. They probably do some data formatting on emails to no get caught so easily and obviously.
No + required. There are hundreds of companies offering aliases using their shared domain. You can also just generate a temporary email address if you don’t require any ongoing communication and the account is not super important.
+aliases are convenience aliases only. They are often stripped from ID datasets. Better to use a real alias.Also 2FA. You’ll still want to change passwords but it buys you time.
Don’t forget unique email addresses. I’ve had two spam emails in the last 6 months, I could trace them to exactly which company I gave that email address to (one data breach, one I’m pretty sure was the company selling my data). I can block those addresses and move on with my life.
My old email address from before I started doing this still receives 10+ spam emails a day.
I’ve started using {emailaddress}+{sitename}@gmail.com i.e. myemail+xyzCompany@gmail.com
That way I can at least see who sold my info. I wish I would have started doing this long ago though. Some sites dont let you use the plus symbol even though it’s valid though
This trick is common enough and trivial to reverse engineer. I can just purge my billion-email-address hacked list of all characters between a + and an @ and have a clean list that untraceable with your system.
Right? Has this ever worked for anyone? I’ve never bothered because of how easy it is for spammers to bypass.
Spammers go for the easiest targets. If you do stuff like this, they might redesign their system to make it LESS likely to send to you. Keep in mind theyre targetting the elederly, mentally handicapped, and the emotionally desperate. They specifically DO NOT want to target the educated, technologically literate, and those that will waste their time. By attempting to technologically limit them from their scams, you make it more difficult for them to target you and it makes it obvious theyre not worth your time.
Its not about making yourself scam proof, its about making yourself an unappealing target.
(This all applies to scam emails, dunno if it has any effect if the goal is phishing but i would imagine so. If they can phish 5 people in the time it takes to phish you, youre no longer their target.)
Edit: this is why scam emails look obviously scammy, with misspelled words and grammarical errors. Its not a mistake, its an attempt to preemptively weed out people who want to waste their time
I use a “password pattern”, rather than remembering all the passwords, I just remember a rule I have for how passwords are done, there are some numbers and letters that change depending on what the service is so every password is unique and I can easily remember all of them as long as I remember the rules I put in place
So when someone figures out your rule he has all the passwords
That is assuming that someone will sit there and try to decrypt password rules for that specific person. Chances of that happening are basically 0, unless they are some sort of a high interest person.
What’s more likely, a password manager gets a breach or someone targets only me and manages to find out multiple passwords across multiple services and cross compares them works out what the random numbers and letters mean…
I don’t know your rule, but when I hear this, usually it includes the name of the service or something, so a script kiddie armed with a levenstein distance algo could probably detect it.
That said, the “safer than the person next to you” rule applies here. You’re probably far enough down that list to not matter.
As for password manager breaches, the impact really depends on what data the password manager stores. If all decryption is done client-side and the server never gets the password, an attacker would need to break your password regardless. That’s how Bitwarden works, so the only things a breach could reveal are my email, encrypted data, and any extra info I provided, like payment info. The most likely attack would need to compromise one of the clients. That’s possible, but requires a bit more effort than a database dump.
I was thinking about this earlier. The password manager browser plugin I use (Proton Pass) defaults to staying unlocked for the entire browser session. If someone physically gained access to my PC while my password manager was unlocked, they’d be able to access absolutely every password I have. I changed the behavior to auto-lock and ask for a 6-digit PIN, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t take an impractical amount of time to brute-force a 6-digit PIN.
Before I started use a password manager, I’d use maybe 3-4 passwords for different “risks,” (bank, email, shopping, stupid shit that made me sign up, etc). Not really sure if a password manager is better (guess it depends on the “threat” you’re worried about).
Edit: Also on my phone, it just unlocks with a fingerprint, and I think law enforcement are allowed to force you to biometrically unlock stuff (or can unlock with fingerprints they have on file).
Yes, it is better. The likelihood that someone will physically access your device is incredibly low, the likelihood that one of the services in your bucket gets leaked and jeopardizes your other accounts is way higher.
I set mine to require my password after a period of time on certain devices (the ones I’m likely to lose), and all of them require it when restarting the browser.
True, but it’s also highly unlikely that LE will steal your passwords.
My phone requires a PIN after X hours or after a few failed fingerprint attempts, and it’s easy to fail without being sus. In my country, I cannot be forced to reveal a PIN. If I travel to a sketchy country or something, i switch it to a password unlock.
Also, length is most of what matters. A full length sentence in lowercase with easy to type finger/key flow for pw manager master, and don’t know a single other password. Can someone correct me if I’m wrong?
I’ve found that there are a handful of passwords that you need to remember, the rest can go in the password manager. This includes the password for the password manager, of course, but also passwords for your computer/phone (since you need to log in before you can access the password manager), and your email (to be able to recover your password for the password manager).
You are also correct that length is mostly what matters, but also throwing in a random capitalization, a number or two, and some special character will greatly increase the required search space. Also using uncommon words, or words in other languages than english can also greatly increase the resistance to dictionary attacks.
If your password manager has a password recovery mechanism, that means your key is stored on the server and would be compromised in a breach. If that’s the case, I highly recommend changing password managers.
The ideal way a password manager works is by having all encryption done client-side and never sending the password to the server. If the server cannot decrypt your password data, neither can an attacker. That’s how my password manager works (Bitwarden), and I highly recommend restricting your options only to password managers with that property.
If you need a backup, write it in a notebook and keep it in a safe. If your house gets broken into, change your password immediately before the thief has a chance to rifle through the stuff they stole. My SO and I have shared passwords to all important credentials, so that’s out backup mechanism.
You are mostly correct it is length * (possible char values).
See passphrase generator.
https://www.keepersecurity.com/features/passphrase-generator
Correct horse battery staple
That was my sisters name!
And when that password manager gets cracked?
Got any examples? Because I have…some…examples of password reuse being a real-life problem.
LastPass recently, check Addie Lamarr’s channel on YouTube.
LastPass is the maximum shit. They got hacked like 3 times in a year and my company‘s password notes got leaked.
We are now with Bitwarden and this was the biggest security hardening measure we have taken.
Yeah, I left LastPass after like 15 years when I’ve come across some news headlines that it had got breaches more than once while I was using it O.o
Been a happy user of Bitwarden for a couple years now. I love that little “copy custom field name” function, so I don’t have to go hunting around in the HTML code if a site is using weird field names.
Make sure whatever password manager you use doesn’t store the key on their servers. Bitwarden does this correctly (if you lose your PW, Bitwarden can’t recover it), and I’m sure some competitors do as well. LastPass apparently didn’t.
Which one works on all browsers including mobile safari and mobile Firefox?
Bitwarden has been good for me, but I actually don’t know about safari…
Yes and no; they have their own issues:
https://cybersecuritynews.com/hackers-weaponize-keepass-password-manager/
A password manager is still a good idea, but you have to not use a hacked one. So only download from official sites and repositories. Run everything you download through VirusTotal and your machine’s antivirus if you have one. If it’s a Windows installer check it is properly signed (Windows should warn you if not). Otherwise (or in addition) check installer signatures with GPG. If there’s no signature, check the SHA256 OR SHA512 hash against the one published on the official site. Never follow a link in an email, but always go directly to the official website instead. Be especially careful with these precautions when downloading something critical like a password manager.
Doing these things will at least reduce your risk of installing compromised software.
I assure you, the rare security issues for password managers are far preferable to managing compromises every couple weeks.
I’ve only really been in one breach. This one is actually a breach of a “security firm” (incompetent idiots) who aggregated login data from the dark web themselves, essentially doing the blackhats’ work for them.
This is also EXACTLY why requiring online interactions to be verified with government ID is a terrible idea. Hackers will similarly be able to gain all possible wanted data in a single location. It’s simply too tempting of a target not to shoot for.
If you think you’ve only been in one breach, you’re probably mistaken or very young. I don’t know how many breaches I’ve been involved in, but it’s at least double digits.
I’m American, and my Social Security number has been leaked multiple times. Each time I’ve done everything possible to secure my accounts (random passwords, TOTP 2FA where possible, randomized usernames, etc), yet there’s always a new breach that impacts me.
I’m not too worried though. My important accounts are pretty secure. I use one of the few banks (brokerage actually) that provides proper 2FA. My email and password manager use 2FA. My credit is frozen. Breaches happen, the important thing is to limit the impact of a breach.
You’ve only been in one breach that you know about so far!