So Roboform has almost certainly thousands (of not millions) of users with weak passwords, and not only didn't they tell anyone, all they give is a shrug when asked about it.
Anyway the major benefit of using a password manager isn't generating difficult to guess passwords.
It's being able to generate unique passwords so when you're details end up on https://haveibeenpwned.com people can't take the password that's leaked and try it on all the other services you've used.
I mean how weak are they really? These guys knew the algo and still struggled and pestered the user over and over for the other parameters. They also had what I would describe as an extreme motivation to crack this.
The constraint is knowing when the password was created. If you know that within a day or so, that makes the problem much more tractable and you can instead focus on number of characters and the other parameters.
Sniffing traffic (yes even encrypted) would be enough to see if you’re going through the login or initial user establishment flow, and that would give you a precise time when the password was generated.
Security people overusing the words serious and critical have really watered down the terms. At this point when I get told something is a serious risk, I file it next to being hit by lightning or eaten by sharks.
sorry to hear that. I don't exaggerate, but the unfortunate part is there is a lot of FUD out there- I just had a friend install nordvpn because someone sent her a gift card scam email to her business email address. So there's a lot of misinformation out there, mostly from folks selling product.
Password management is one of those fundamental security foundations- essentially serving as the 'root of trust' for your own personal digital life. If you mess that up, you're in for a world of hurt. I don't mess around with passwords. Taking your analogy, would you intentionally stand outside under a tree in a thunderstorm, figuring that the risk of getting hit by lightning is so small?
In this situation, the attacker had to know you were using this particular password manager, know roughly when the password was generated, reverse engineer and replicate the password generation algorithm, and make millions of login attempts somehow (almost never possible other than on crypto wallets).
Yes it’s obviously not good that they used the date as a seed, but the realistic risk is pretty much non existent. Even in this case where literal millions of dollars were on the line the “attackers” still had to collaborate heavily with the owner to narrow down the search space. On their own they likely would never crack it.
Absolutely no one is going through all this to get in to your Facebook account when they can just call up some grandma and ask them to transfer a $1000.
You've shifted the goalposts here. You're right that this all comes down to economics. You're not going to go to these lengths to break into a Facebook account -- however -- you have to remember that there is a lot of transitive trust nowadays.
So that Facebook account may allow you federated login to something you do care about. Or your Facebook account is the front page for your business, where a defacement or outage could cost you thousands of $$$. Or you reused your Facebook account's password as the password for your email, which probably was the recovery email for every online account you have... meaning you can now log into every service given access to your email.
Real security is about threat modeling and risk mitigation. Risk mitigation is simply the application of a rough economic model of both the attacker and defender to find a median where you are comfortable. Essentially a fancy way of determining how fast you need to run so that the bear eats the slower person first. Your example is apt- the grandma who is scammed out of $1000 is running much slower than the grandmas who were not, all things being equal.
So when it's "just" a Facebook account on the line, yes, nobody is going to go through massive effort to crack it. But that's not what the original post was about - it was about unlocking millions of $$ worth of Bitcoin. That's worth some effort. Remember also that, in this story, the person who retrieved the password does not end up with 100% of the proceeds, as you would in an adversarial scenario. In the adversarial scenario, the adversary's risk calculus is vastly different and they would be willing to spend a lot more effort (time, money, resources) into cracking that password.
The fact that a password could be cracked at all means it was very weak. Strong passwords can't be cracked with any realistic amount of resources or motivation.
I used the absolute language "can't" intentionally, because frankly, in most contexts outside pure math it's more misleadling to state guessing a sufficiently long truely random password is possible than to say it's impossible. Humans can't really intuitively handle probabilities so small. It's the same reason we say heat "always" flows from higher to lower temerature.
Hard to say without details; but now that the weakness is known it may become a lot easier. It's one thing if you think it may work if you have the correct parameters but aren't sure, and quite another if you know it will work.
Password managers are kind of a "defence in depth" thing; practical speaking, a passwords.txt opened with notepad is probably fine for many people. No one is in your computer checking your files. You have a password manager for when that does happen, just in case. And usually this tends to be a targetted attack, which can range from some country's secret service to a jealous spouse to a trolling sibling. If that extra protection is ineffective ... yeah, that's not great.
This really is "better safe than sorry" type territory. Password managers (including Roboform) already do this by notifying users a password may be insecure after a leak. A lot of the time that's not really needed if your password is sufficiently secure, but "better safe than sorry". This is not all that different.
If it had a default creation setting, it would be much easier to crack most user's passwords. There's still a motivation issue, but that's not a solid defense.
A lot of security processes are not designed for say state actors with library of 0- days or monopoly on violence(i.e. $5 wrench) that doesn’t make them bad.
Security is a spectrum, perhaps some subset users needed a more secure system most probably still benefited from this tool ?
They are supposed to disclose the vulnerability after fixing it, so their users know they need to take action. That's what the original commenter rightly complained about.
People have bank passwords, social media accounts (which can be used in all sorts of nefarious ways), etc. Some may be 2FA protected, some may not be. Some may be protected by bad faux-2FA.
Just because there aren't million at stake doesn't mean you can't bring someone to ruin.
Most users are going to be already logged in on their phone apps so they won’t be affected. And the inconvenience is most likely going to be chucking up a captcha to prevent automated attempts.
Crypto doesn’t change the game. Products that generate passwords should do so securely.
You may be using it to protect extremely sensitive information that could have people killed - that’s more important than a few million dollars in imaginary money
What a bunch of bozos.