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The UK Bans Default Passwords

Schneier on Security

The UK is the first country to ban default passwords on IoT devices. On Monday, the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to ban default guessable usernames and passwords from these IoT devices. Unique passwords installed by default are still permitted. This sort of thing benefits all of us everywhere.

Passwords 288
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LastPass: ‘Horse Gone Barn Bolted’ is Strong Password

Krebs on Security

The password manager service LastPass is now forcing some of its users to pick longer master passwords. But critics say the move is little more than a public relations stunt that will do nothing to help countless early adopters whose password vaults were exposed in a 2022 breach at LastPass.

Passwords 294
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Open Source Pwned Passwords with FBI Feed and 225M New NCA Passwords is Now Live!

Troy Hunt

In the last month, there were 1,260,000,000 occasions where a service somewhere checked a password against Have I Been Pwned's (HIBP's) Pwned Password API. It looks like this: There are all sorts of amazing Pwned Passwords use cases out there. Fast forward to now and that ingestion pipeline is finally live.

Passwords 362
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Banks, Arbitrary Password Restrictions and Why They Don't Matter

Troy Hunt

Allow me to be controversial for a moment: arbitrary password restrictions on banks such as short max lengths and disallowed characters don't matter. troyhunt pic.twitter.com/9FMSdvVRiL — Hagen (@hagendittmer) June 3, 2018. link] @troyhunt — Daniel Parker (@CodyMcCodeFace) June 21, 2018. 6 characters.

Banking 234
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Patch Tuesday, November 2018 Edition

Krebs on Security

This week’s patch batch addresses two flaws of particular urgency: One is a zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2018-8589 ) that is already being exploited to compromise Windows 7 and Server 2008 systems. Of course, if the target has Adobe Reader or Acrobat installed, it might be easier for attackers to achieve that log in.

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Enhancing Pwned Passwords Privacy with Padding

Troy Hunt

Since launching version 2 of Pwned Passwords with the k-anonymity model just over 2 years ago now, the thing has really gone nuts (read that blog post for background otherwise nothing from here on will make much sense). They could be searching for any password whose SHA-1 hash begins with those characters. Very slick!

Passwords 272
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Pwned Passwords, Version 5

Troy Hunt

Almost 2 years ago to the day, I wrote about Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era. Shortly after that blog post I launched Pwned Passwords with 306M passwords from previous breach corpuses. 3,768,890 passwords. 3,768,890 passwords.

Passwords 230