![]() Hackers now have several approaches to hacking your passwords, and the computing power to make them realistic. ![]() Specifically, how to create strong passwords. While buying and stealing passwords is a giant problem, today we are looking at the passwords themselves. Crooks aim to buy, steal, or hack your passwords to get access to your bank accounts, social media accounts, corporate databases, and anything that might have value to someone else. Today, an entire industry has grown up around defeating your passwords. Once upon a time, a simple password was enough to protect your accounts on the internet. We want this guide to be short and actionable, so let’s get right into it. Today we’ll take a brief look at the situation, then dive right into how to create strong passwords. So it is no surprise that an entire (illegal) industry has grown up around trying to hack passwords. Other than that? Keep using a password manager and enable two-factor authentication.Passwords are the main way we protect everything on the internet. So what does this mean for the average KPM user? Well, if they've been using the same KPM-generated passwords for over two years (a habit that would typically be fine), they should create new ones. SEE ALSO: Why you need a secret phone number (and how to get one) "The company has issued a fix to the product and has incorporated a mechanism that notifies users if a specific password generated by the tool could be vulnerable and needs changing." That alert also noted that, going forward, the password manager had fixed the issue - a claim echoed by the spokesperson. "An attacker would need to know some additional information (for example, time of password generation)." "Password generator was not completely cryptographically strong and potentially allowed an attacker to predict generated passwords in some cases," read the alert. ![]() Kaspersky also published a security advisory (Opens in a new tab) detailing the flaw in April of 2021. "It would also require the target to lower their password complexity settings." ![]() "This issue was only possible in the unlikely event that the attacker knew the user's account information and the exact time a password had been generated," wrote a company spokesperson. When reached for comment, Kaspersky confirmed - but downplayed - the problem identified by Bédrune. "All the passwords it created could be bruteforced in seconds," writes Bédrune.īédrune's team submitted the vulnerability to Kaspersky through HackerOne's bug bounty program in June of 2019, and Ledger's blog post says Kaspersky notified potentially affected users in October of 2020. Knowing when the password was generated, even approximately, would therefore give a hacker vital information in an attempt to crack a victim's account. While that sounds super technical, it essentially boils down to KPM using the time as the basis for its pseudo random number generator. Unfortunately, according to security researcher Jean-Baptiste Bédrune (Opens in a new tab), a bad coding decision meant that the passwords it generated weren't truly random and as a result were relatively easy to brute force - a hacking technique using specialized tools to try hundreds of thousands (or millions) of password combinations in an attempt to guess the right one.īédrune, who is a security researcher for the cryptocurrency hard-wallet company Ledger (Opens in a new tab), writes that when generating a supposedly random password, KPM used the current time as its "single source of entropy." The Kaspersky Password Manager (Opens in a new tab) (KPM), a free tool used to generate and manage online passwords, has long been a popular alternative to the likes of LastPass or 1Password. Password managers are a vital line of defense in the battle for internet security - which makes it all the more painful when they shit the bed.
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