The only thing that would have prevented this in this context would be mandatory MFA. Did they have that? No, but there’s a huge number of places that are way more sensitive than a streaming platform that don’t have mandatory MFA (coughETradecough).
It is wholly misleading to characterize this as a “Roku data breach,” and it’s disingenuous to portray Roku in this instance as somehow glaringly worse than everyone else.
No. Nobody has stolen hashes. They have usernames and passwords collected from elsewhere, that they tried against Roku, because people tend to reuse usernames and passwords.
That doesn’t have anything to do with it, really. There’s plenty of ways that credentials get “leaked,” not the least of which is users who reuse passwords also falling for scam emails that have them “log in” to something. It could matter if some specific credentials were initially acquired because some other place was storing clear text passwords, and that place had a breach.
Still wouldn’t be an issue at all if users didn’t reuse passwords. That’s the lynchpin. This is users’ fault, not Roku’s.
It could matter if some specific credentials were initially acquired because some other place was storing clear text passwords, and that place had a breach.
Exactly, that was my assumption.
After all, reusing passwords for multiple sites becomes a problem as soon the password becomes known. But for that password to become known, some site had to either allow the plaintext password to be leaked, or an unsalted hash. Or the site has to allow for insecure (easily guessable) passwords to be used.
Reusing passwords is undeniably the user’s fault, but only because some other site’s security measures may also have been negligent.
Yeah, but they don’t have contemporary best practices in place that would’ve reduced their exposure to this.
The only thing that would have prevented this in this context would be mandatory MFA. Did they have that? No, but there’s a huge number of places that are way more sensitive than a streaming platform that don’t have mandatory MFA (coughETradecough).
It is wholly misleading to characterize this as a “Roku data breach,” and it’s disingenuous to portray Roku in this instance as somehow glaringly worse than everyone else.
Wouldn’t salted hashes have prevented this?
You just add some extra characters to every password before hashing and then stolen hashes and rainbow tables don’t work any more.
In other words, I think ghostalmedia is correct, best practices would have prevented this.
No. Nobody has stolen hashes. They have usernames and passwords collected from elsewhere, that they tried against Roku, because people tend to reuse usernames and passwords.
Ugh… Who is still storing passwords in the clear… For fuck sake…
That doesn’t have anything to do with it, really. There’s plenty of ways that credentials get “leaked,” not the least of which is users who reuse passwords also falling for scam emails that have them “log in” to something. It could matter if some specific credentials were initially acquired because some other place was storing clear text passwords, and that place had a breach.
Still wouldn’t be an issue at all if users didn’t reuse passwords. That’s the lynchpin. This is users’ fault, not Roku’s.
Exactly, that was my assumption.
After all, reusing passwords for multiple sites becomes a problem as soon the password becomes known. But for that password to become known, some site had to either allow the plaintext password to be leaked, or an unsalted hash. Or the site has to allow for insecure (easily guessable) passwords to be used.
Reusing passwords is undeniably the user’s fault, but only because some other site’s security measures may also have been negligent.
Will be interesting to see how people react when Netflix rolls out mandatory two factor auth for logins.