Slack’s GitHub Exposed – Another MFA Failure

Slack reported suspicious activity on January 9th, 2023 regarding a breach in it’s remotely stored GitHub account. Upon investigation, it was found that tokens of a few Slack employees were stolen, and used to gain access to remote git repositories. The threat actors also downloaded code from private repository. Slack also stated that the threat resulted from a third party vendor, and also assured its users that no customer data is at risk.

Previous Incidents

In March 2015, Slack shared that it had been hacked for over four days in Feb 2015. Additionally, In January 2021, it had a outage for several hours. In a previous blog , we have discussed a past security bug on Slack at December 2022 where passwords were stored in their Android apps in plain text.

Reason and Impact

The attackers were able to gain access due to a security flaw in Slack’s authentication system using Brute Force. Once they had access, they were able to steal the secret seeds (used to generate pseudo random tokens) associated with that organisation’s account and gain access to the private code repositories stored on GitHub. The fact that a brute force attack was successful indicates a security lapse from Slack.

The company claims that the threat actors did not get access to production environment, customer data or Slack resources. Additionally, Slack rotated the concerning tokens with the third vendors, and deployed additional security on their externally hosted GitHub.

About MFA Tokens

In their update what Slack is mentioning as token are MFA seeds or secret keys. These seeds or keys are shared secret between the (Slack’s) server and user’s MFA application. These seeds are used in generation of tokens which are then used to authenticate user in conjunction with passwords.

image credit – Twilio

Twilio has provided here a detailed explanation on how the MFA works with secret keys. Unfortunately Twilio’s Authy was breached and customer’s TOTP secret keys were leaked in the recent past.

Mitigation

Authentication system depending on abusable data like Passwords, Biometrics, or TOTP/HOTP Tokens, of public-keys are insecure by design. Adopting authentication solution which makes use of zero-knowledge factors are resilient to data leakage in case of breach.

PureID‘s Passwordless Authentication platform – PureAUTH eliminates the risk in case of total breach of the authentication parameters it uses to verify users.

Check out, how PureAUTH makes Slack Passwordless and secure from credential based attacks.

Connect with us to know how PureAUTH platform can help your enterprise be more secure and resilient.

Password Managers are the Hot Targets 

Lastpass reported a security breach a month ago, which is the 8th security incident in the last 11 years. This incident was followed by a recent disclosure by a Google researcher. Many popular password managers like Dashlane, Bitwarden, and Safari can be phished.

There are many lessons that we all need to learn from these recurring incidents. This post is to uncover few points that we have seen have not been discussed by the info-sec community and the industry.

The Catch-22 – Phish or no Phish?

LastPass warned its users of an increased likelihood of Phishing attacks, Credential Stuffing, or other brute force attacks against online accounts associated with their LastPass vault.

Password Managers getting phished is an alarming situation

This statement goes against what all the password managers like LastPass claims – “use of password manager protects users from phishing attacks“.

In recent times there have been more incidents where password managers have been proved vulnerable to phishing attacks. You can find more details in this article Popular password managers auto-filled credentials on untrusted websites 

The Impact

In their blog post, Lastpass reported that customer’s personal information like email, phone number, billing address, IP address have been compromised. That is not all, what LastPass has not talked about is the additional information they collect from their users using their mobile app. 

The screenshots below show the permissions that Lastpass app takes on a user’s phone.

Permission take by LastPass app on an Android device

These permissions enable the application provider like LastPass (other password managers take similar types of permission on user’s device) to collect more information about the user than probably needed. 

User Information collected by LastPass app

In case of a breach, like what happened with LastPass, the severity of the incident and privacy impatc will be more if any additional information collected from the user’s phone is also leaked.

The Passwords

Furthermore, LastPass has reported that customer’s vault containing clear text data, such as website url, and encrypted data of username and password were also obtained by the threat actors. 

Lastpass emphasised on the use of master key, and how a threat actor can not decrypt the password vault even if they have the encrypted data, as the master key, which is a master password set by the user and is not stored on lastpass network. 

While 1Password, a rival firm of Lastpass, claims through their blog that passwords of LastPass can be cracked in $100. They also talk about their superior method of  using secret key and Password Authenticated Key Agreement systems, which makes 1Password’s systems next to impossible to crack. 

With the device specific keys mentioned by 1Password, we feel syncing of the passwords across multiple devices becomes a risky affair. Since passwords need to be decrypted on another device and it needs the user chosen master password as well as the secret key from the earlier device. This problem cannot be solved without exposing the secret key or the user’s passwords (encrypted just with the user chosen master password), in transit. 

Conclusion

After a series of events involving Password Management products, enterprise must seriously think about how safe their user’s data and passwords really are. 

Not to forget, server doesn’t care if the password is coming from a password vault or from an adversary, the server will authenticate as long as it can match the string. So no matter, how and where you store passwords, as long as there as passwords, Enterprises are always at risk.

For a better security, Enterprise must plan to remove passwords from their applications, servers and #GoPasswordless

Passwords are like Plastic; Lets get rid of ’em

Passwords are at the foundation of security and access control ever since humans felt the need of securing resources and access to it. Passwords have been used and abused since millennium and the best documented example of this is “Open Sesame”. 

The surprising fact is even after millennium passwords are ubiquitous, and mean anything but security. The World Password Day is coming up on 7th of May 2020,  let us see what we have learned in the last decade about passwords.

Passwords are Pain

Passwords are pain for an enterprise, right from its users to administrators.

Pain to Manage

A 2016 survey conducted by Intel Security concluded that an average person uses 27 discrete online services. For security reasons it is a must to have different passwords for enterprise applications, social networking sites and online banking but at the same time, very painful to remember all of them. People often reuse their enterprise passwords at external sites and vice versa.

Pain to Comply & Govern

Compliance & Governance mandate passwords to be complex and securely stored. Time and again we have seen from the incidents at  Robinhood, GitHub, Facebook, Instagram and Citrix that even world class enterprises fail to comply. Another big governance failure is to restrict unwarranted sharing of credentials and OTP within an organisation.

Enterprise measures for compliance & governance are defeated due to users’ and administrator’s common but insecure practices.

Passwords in plain text
Passwords in plain text

Pain to Secure

Enterprises spend a significant sum to secure passwords by layering them with additional factors. This increases more things to manage and support but still leaves passwords insecure.

Enterprises are insecure as long as they have passwords in their system

Credential sharing
Credential sharing

Passwords are Risk

2018  Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report stated that 81% of the breaches that year involved Passwords. Phishing, credential stuffing and stealing passwords from processes or dumps being the top vectors.

2019  Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report stated Stolen Credentials as a top most risk for an enterprise, along with web-application vulnerabilities and ransomware.

2020 First quarter is over and things have not changed much. So far we have seen several security incidents involving Passwords.

Cognizant breached by Maze ransomware
SFO Airport breached with stolen credentials
Compromised Zoom credentials swapped in underground

Phishing
Phishing

Passwords are Outdated

The universal availability of mobile devices and newer ways  of authentication it offers, has inspired the world to think Beyond Passwords.

Gartner suggests “Eliminate centrally managed passwords for better security, fewer breaches, lower support costs and enhanced user experience.” in its report Passwordless Approach to improve security

Conclusion

This new decade is a time to go passwordless.