You can keep your Mastodon account extra safe by using Two Factor Authentication (2FA).

To activate this, log in through your server's website and go to ⚙️ Preferences > Account > Two Factor Auth, then follow the instructions.

It is slightly tricky to set up, but once it's been set up it's very easy to use.

2FA means that even if someone finds out your password they cannot log in. With 2FA activated, your phone will give you a new code each time you log in to allow your password to work.

Asked by @ajsnonsense: Should I use Norton or move to Defender?

This is one of those questions that can be answered in an edgy way historically 1, turns out to be simple in practice 2, and at broad scale is very complex 3.

1.) Those out of practice will tell you Defender sucks. But it doesn't anymore. Ignore them.
2.) Those talking practically will say absolutely use Defender. Make sure you're on the latest Windows build with Tamper protection enabled and your "Win10 privacy tool" didn't unknowingly disable half the protection features through ignorant choices, and you have a super-powerful solution for free. And they are right. That's what I do.
3.) Defender for home users is great, but intractably could do more because it is cuffed by the requirements it work perfectly without much user input across a billion devices, and that attackers will always test against it even if it can adapt quickly via cloud. [I AM TALKING CONSUMER ONLY THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO DEFENDER ATP OR CUSTOMIZED ENTERPRISE STUFF LIKE ASR GROUP POLICY]
Some third-party vendors have their own very novel and more noisy approaches to try to differentiate themselves from this free offering. I won't get in that here.

tl;dr I would not use anything bundled in a computer, I use Defender, but also do not discount unique approaches others can bring to the table – and if you make an informed choice, I support that.

This is the kind of thing you can't say in 280 characters.

I recently wrote a post detailing the recent #LastPass breach from a #password cracker's perspective, and for the most part it was well-received and widely boosted. However, a good number of people questioned why I recommend ditching LastPass and expressed concern with me recommending people jump ship simply because they suffered a breach. Even more are questioning why I recommend #Bitwarden and #1Password, what advantages they hold over LastPass, and why would I dare recommend yet another cloud-based password manager (because obviously the problem is the entire #cloud, not a particular company.)

So, here are my responses to all of these concerns!

Let me start by saying I used to support LastPass. I recommended it for years and defended it publicly in the media. If you search Google for "jeremi gosney" + "lastpass" you'll find hundreds of articles where I've defended and/or pimped LastPass (including in Consumer Reports magazine). I defended it even in the face of vulnerabilities and breaches, because it had superior UX and still seemed like the best option for the masses despite its glaring flaws. And it still has a somewhat special place in my heart, being the password manager that actually turned me on to password managers. It set the bar for what I required from a password manager, and for a while it was unrivaled.

But things change, and in recent years I found myself unable to defend LastPass. I can't recall if there was a particular straw that broke the camel's back, but I do know that I stopped recommending it in 2017 and fully migrated away from it in 2019. Below is an unordered list of the reasons why I lost all faith in LastPass:

- LastPass's claim of "zero knowledge" is a bald-faced lie. They have about as much knowledge as a password manager can possibly get away with. Every time you login to a site, an event is generated and sent to LastPass for the sole purpose of tracking what sites you are logging into. You can disable telemetry, except disabling it doesn't do anything - it still phones home to LastPass every time you authenticate somewhere. Moreover, nearly everything in your LastPass vault is unencrypted. I think most people envision their vault as a sort of encrypted database where the entire file is protected, but no -- with LastPass, your vault is a plaintext file and only a few select fields are encrypted. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass uses shit #encryption (or "encraption", as @sc00bz calls it). Padding oracle vulnerabilities, use of ECB mode (leaks information about password length and which passwords in the vault are similar/the same. recently switched to unauthenticated CBC, which isn't much better, plus old entries will still be encrypted with ECB mode), vault key uses AES256 but key is derived from only 128 bits of entropy, encryption key leaked through webui, silent KDF downgrade, KDF hash leaked in log files, they even roll their own version of AES - they essentially commit every "crypto 101" sin. All of these are trivial to identify (and fix!) by anyone with even basic familiarity with cryptography, and it's frankly appalling that an alleged security company whose product hinges on cryptography would have such glaring errors. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass has terrible secrets management. Your vault encryption key always resident in memory and never wiped, and not only that, but the entire vault is decrypted once and stored entirely in memory. If that wasn't enough, the vault recovery key and dOTP are stored on each device in plain text and can be read without root/admin access, rendering the master password rather useless. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass's browser extensions are garbage. Just pure, unadulterated garbage. Tavis Ormandy went on a hunting spree a few years back and found just about every possible bug -- including credential theft and RCE -- present in LastPass's browser extensions. They also render your browser's sandbox mostly ineffective. Again, for an alleged security company, the sheer amount of high and critical severity bugs was beyond unconscionable. All easy to identify, all easy to fix. Their presence can only be explained by apathy and negligence. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass's API is also garbage. Server-can-attack-client vulns (server can request encryption key from the client, server can instruct client to inject any javascript it wants on every web page, including code to steal plaintext credentials), JWT issues, HTTP verb confusion, account recovery links can be easily forged, the list goes on. Most of these are possibly low-risk, except in the event that LastPass loses control of its servers. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass has suffered 7 major #security breaches (malicious actors active on the internal network) in the last 10 years. I don't know what the threshold of "number of major breaches users should tolerate before they lose all faith in the service" is, but surely it's less than 7. So all those "this is only an issue if LastPass loses control of its servers" vulns are actually pretty damn plausible. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass has a history of ignoring security researchers and vuln reports, and does not participate in the infosec community nor the password cracking community. Vuln reports go unacknowledged and unresolved for months, if not years, if not ever. For a while, they even had an incorrect contact listed for their security team. Bugcrowd fields vulns for them now, and most if not all vuln reports are handled directly by Bugcrowd and not by LastPass. If you try to report a vulnerability to LastPass support, they will pretend they do not understand and will not escalate your ticket to the security team. Now, Tavis Ormandy has praised LastPass for their rapid response to vuln reports, but I have a feeling this is simply because it's Tavis / Project Zero reporting them as this is not the experience that most researchers have had.

You see, I'm not simply recommending that users bail on LastPass because of this latest breach. I'm recommending you run as far way as possible from LastPass due to its long history of incompetence, apathy, and negligence. It's abundantly clear that they do not care about their own security, and much less about your security.

So, why do I recommend Bitwarden and 1Password? It's quite simple:

- I personally know the people who architect 1Password and I can attest that not only are they extremely competent and very talented, but they also actively engage with the password cracking community and have a deep, *deep* desire to do everything in the most correct manner possible. Do they still get some things wrong? Sure. But they strive for continuous improvement and sincerely care about security. Also, their secret key feature ensures that if anyone does obtain a copy of your vault, they simply cannot access it with the master password alone, making it uncrackable.

- Bitwarden is 100% open source. I have not done a thorough code review, but I have taken a fairly long glance at the code and I am mostly pleased with what I've seen. I'm less thrilled about it being written in a garbage collected language and there are some tradeoffs that are made there, but overall Bitwarden is a solid product. I also prefer Bitwarden's UX. I've also considered crowdfunding a formal audit of Bitwarden, much in the way the Open Crypto Audit Project raised the funds to properly audit TrueCrypt. The community would greatly benefit from this.

Is the cloud the problem? No. The vast majority of issues LastPass has had have nothing to do with the fact that it is a cloud-based solution. Further, consider the fact that the threat model for a cloud-based password management solution should *start* with the vault being compromised. In fact, if password management is done correctly, I should be able to host my vault anywhere, even openly downloadable (open S3 bucket, unauthenticated HTTPS, etc.) without concern. I wouldn't do that, of course, but the point is the vault should be just that -- a vault, not a lockbox.

I hope this clarifies things! As always, if you found this useful, please boost for reach and give me a follow for more password insights!

Found an incredibly useful app for finding people to follow on Mastodon. It crawls your social graph then finds the people who your followers follow the most that you don't follow.

https://followgraph.vercel.app/

LASTPASS NEWS ALERT AND COMMENTARY:
LastPass attackers know your name and billing address and all websites you have saved passwords for, and if your master password isn't sufficiently strong may be possible to brute-force open everything on attacker's machines.

PLEASE READ BEFORE PROCEEDING: https://blog.lastpass.com/2022/12/notice-of-recent-security-incident/

The fact LastPass doesn't encrypt website URLs is a known flaw it appears they never fixed on purpose, going back almost 6 years:
https://hackernoon.com/psa-lastpass-does-not-encrypt-everything-in-your-vault-8722d69b2032

This eventual possible security breach was planned-for as part of LastPass' design for username and password protection. This doesn't break the core offering.
But it has stripped away multiple layers of protection and will hasten my looking at @bitwarden

It's impossible to be completely secure in a massive offering. However I have always disagreed with their decision to not 100% encrypt all metadata, and this event shows that was a foolish choice when seen against the inevitable of the entropy our complex electronic systems.

In the end, a password manager is still right choice in comparison to alternative. And a cloud-native offering like LastPass strongly hedges against data loss by normal users trying to manage their own vault. That is an undersold primary risk, not hackers. Still, very disappointed.

Current password setup:
- Primary vault is LastPass with 2FA
- Core fallback "key" accounts like email that allow pw reset are only in a KeyPass db file with 20char password, synced via OneDrive+2FA.
- This is then further backed-up with BackBlaze, using 40char encryption key