Officials at password manager LastPass revealed the company has been compromised in a data breach.
According to LastPass CEO Joe Siegrist, an investigation into suspicious activity detected and blocked on the company’s network Friday has revealed that LastPass user account email addresses, password reminders, server per user salts and authentication hashes were compromised.
“We are confident that our encryption measures are sufficient to protect the vast majority of users,” he blogged. “LastPass strengthens the authentication hash with a random salt and 100,000 rounds of server-side PBKDF2-SHA256, in addition to the rounds performed client-side. This additional strengthening makes it difficult to attack the stolen hashes with any significant speed.”
The investigation did not turn up any evidence that encrypted user vault data was taken or that LastPass user accounts were accessed.
“Nonetheless, we are taking additional measures to ensure that your data remains secure,” Siegrist blogged. “We are requiring that all users who are logging in from a new device or IP address first verify their account by email, unless you have multifactor authentication enabled. As an added precaution, we will also be prompting users to update their master password. An email is also being sent to all users regarding this security incident.”
Rapid7 Security Engineering Manager Tod Beardsley said that he was pleased to see that LastPass disclosed the breach in a weekend’s time. He added however that the attackers apparently have all they need to start brute-forcing master passwords.
“The fact that the attackers are now armed with a list of LastPass users by e-mail means that we may see some targeted phishing campaigns, presenting users with fake “Update your LastPass master password” links,” said Beardsley. “So, while further direct communication from LastPass to their users about this breach should be welcome, it should be treated with suspicion if there are any embedded links and calls to action.”
