Plaintext passwords huh, that's about as bad as it gets when it comes to breaches. The only upside is that this data is from 5 years ago so _hopefully_ a percentage of this breach is outdated.
Turn of millennium was era before of SSL/TLS. Livejournal did not want to send clear text password during login to the site. SRP was patent encumbered (and anyway implementing proper PAKE in JavaScript of that era was unfeasible).
I doubt they were storing plaintext passwords. If I remember rightly the way LiveJournal login worked back in the day is that the server stored the MD5 of the password. Then when someone went to log in the server sent a random challenge to the client, which computed the MD5 of the password locally, concatenated that with the challenge, and sent the MD5 of that to the server. This does have the unfortunate consequence that knowing the server-stored MD5 is equivalent to having the plaintext password when logging into LiveJournal, but it doesn't give the server an actual plaintext password that can be used elsewhere. Someone's probably been busy doing some password cracking.
Even if everybody on LiveJournal has since changed their passwords (there and everywhere they repeated it, which we know they won’t have), this now adds to the dictionary of passwords which _other_ humans may have chosen elsewhere and will certainly increase the hit rate of password spraying attacks etc.
While everyone recommends turning on 2FA everywhere, I’m increasingly convinced we’d all be safer if the password was the second, optional factor.
> I’m increasingly convinced we’d all be safer if the password was the second, optional factor.
Yes! Why can I not always login via an emailed token, secured by a TOTP? It would set a cookie, so no different in UX once you’re in, and that’s the normal “forgot password” flow, so no different in terms of security. But it would remove the need for me to constantly be opening up various password generation toolkits and resetting passwords and etc.
Because people don’t choose random passwords on the whole. So for every person who is revealed to have used zxcvbnm1234567890 as a password, there is a chance others have too. Obviously not for every password, but every large leak of actual passwords adds some that will match elsewhere.
Yes, that’s one use case. Let’s say you have a database of actually properly hashed passwords. What passwords are you going to prioritise to try first? Every plaintext leak adds to the list of passwords you’d be sensible to try before brute forcing. Plus even for online attacks like password spraying, you’ve got to get an idea of common passwords from _somewhere_ and this leak inevitably adds to that. The only point I’m making is that humans are similar and therefore there’s always a chance they pick similar passwords. Therefore even if all LJ users have since changed their passwords, there are still many risks.
