I just got the email from haveibeenpwned. F Trello.
Obligatory: companies should face harsh penalties for this stuff.
They do, in the EU. If you fuck up your customer’s data, you’ll face fines consisting of hefty percentages of your yearly revenue!
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
Yep, hefty. Top 5: 1.2B meta, 746M amazon, 405M meta, 390M meta, 345M tiktok (all in €).
Oh noooo, 1% of their yearly gross revenue or 1.3% of their yearly gross profit. What a fine!
Side note: I would love to discover a public record of them paying these fines… we hear they ate fined, but never that they had to pay them. What is stopping them from cutting a deal of a payment plan over 20 years with 0% interest or full up front but only paying 30% of it or some lobbying BS.
We can infer that for sure this fine is coming out pre-tax.
This is not something a company did.
The group of people took a list of user names and passwords from a different breach and tried them on trello to see if people used the same password and wrote down which ones did.
Nothing a company can possibly do to stop this, only users can.
Even if the company required 2 factor authentication to fully log in, getting this far would still confirm each account/password combo was correct, which is all the “hackers” did.
This isn’t completely true, but it is the current standard.
A website can detect and block many user/password attempts from the same IP and block IPs that are suspicious.
Websites can detect elivated login fails across many IPs are react accordingly (It may be reasonable to block all logins for a time if they detect an attack like this)
I’m sure there are other strategies, I don’t know how often they are actually employed, but I wish companies would start taking this sort of attack more seriously (even if it’s not at all hacking)
CGNAT would throw a wrench in that when you have thousands of users using mobile data and they appear to be coming from the same ip.
It may be reasonable to block all logins for a time if they detect an attack like this
That would be a P1 incident and probably violate SLAs depending on the duration.
Yes but this wasn’t a data breach. This was a data stuffing incident, meaning they took someone else’s data dump and tried their email and credentials here.
- never use the same username and password in two or more places
- always use MFA, a hard token if you can like a yubikey
It’s a breach.
Attackers queried email addresses and trello responded with names and user names.
Do you own a Yubikey?
Have you ever succeeded in getting it to work with anything??
It didn’t work with gmail, or any other online account I had.
An absolute waste of $$.
Setting up: https://www.yubico.com/setup/yubikey-5-series/
Supported services: https://www.yubico.com/works-with-yubikey/catalog/
Google Accounts (for your gmail): https://www.yubico.com/works-with-yubikey/catalog/google-accounts/
I use yubikey everywhere it’s available for me. Initially, the first few websites in the early years were challenging. I think a lot of devs were still trying to figure out the workflow.
But today, it’s usually as simple, or simpler, than TOTP.
So it might be worth trying again. I’d use a YubiKey 4 or higher if you can. If you have an older one, you may want to upgrade to take advantage of the newer technology like NFC and Bluetooth if you’re into that.
I just wish YubiKey could store more than like 30 TOTP tokens.
Sounds like a skill issue.
Have had yubikey for a few years. It was a pain to set it up initially, but it took me less than an hour if I remember correctly. Since then the only issue I have is that sometimes I accidentally bump into it and it pastes an OTK to a random place.
tbf it’s just email, username and real name so it’s basically nothing when half of users are name.lastname@gmail.com either way.
For project tools like Trello, a good portion of your userbase is company emails. A malicious actor now has a list of company emails that they can compare against public facing data like Linkedin, imitate a user using a gmail based off their name, sending an email to that company’s IT team asking for an MFA reset sent to the newly created gmail account. Now imagine if that compromised user is a developer with admin access to production environments. These were the conditions for various ransomware attacks.
An email, username, real name are not much, but it’s a foot in the door.
It is a foot in the door but honestly there are way too many doors out there so it’s really hard to measure the real damage of this.
I worked at a pretty major employment company like 20 years ago when basically everything was legal and we didn’t need to buy dark web datasets to find real names and contacts ever - most of that data is publicly available and can be captured with simple public scrapers and email checks.
I think expectation of names and emails being private should be thrown out of the window entirely and every security system should implicitly assume these details are publicly known.
I agree that data security is important, even if it is only email addresses, where many are probably findable in the web anyway. Maybe, the link with the username has some value, but I’d bet only little. In my opinion, harsh penalties are more needed in privacy invasive (in my opinion malware) like google, meta, Amazon etc. are spreading.
The problem is that this data can be combined with other data. An email address by itself isn’t particularly important but when it’s matched up with names, physical addresses, DoB, SSN, other PII and the network of other services with matching data it becomes very serious.
It’s never just this breach, it’s every other breach as well. Every breach makes every preceeding breach more effective and more valuable.
Of course, but where are names, physical addresses, DoB, SSN, etc in this dataset? It’s just mail and username
Literally never heard of Trello in my life until today…when my boss sent me a link to join their board…
Do you work in any kind of corporate or business services sector? It feels so ubiquitous to me I’m surprised it’s only 13 years old.
My email has been leaked 20 times now, how lovely
Buddy, you need this more than I do
Things like this only work until platforms block the domains due to abuse.
I exclusively use alias emails and have found the down side. If you use an alias email for each site you visit (let’s say an online shop that is ran by Shopify) there is an extremely high chance your purchase will be flagged (fuck you Shopify) as a fraudulent account. I am constantly being flagged on sites with Shopify back ends for fraud. It really sucks when your hoppy (FPV Drones) is mainly ran by Shopify sites.
P.S. There is no one to help resolve these issues with Shopify as they don’t have a customer support unless you’re a customer and the store owners are either dumb on how to help or just plain lazy.
I found a .com domain helps with this. You can find some ugly ones for cheap
Here is what you should have done. Get a cheap ass domain and signup for Zoho’s email service which is totally free. I bought a cheap domain from them. The price is very reasonable. Then AI proceeded to make use of their free email suite service, which requires your custom domain (hence the cheap domain purchase). The free email suite gives you give free email accounts. Each email account in turn has unlimited alias feature. I use their email accounts each for different uses (work, social media, etc). For only 10$ a year, I do not suffer from spam, promotions and shit. I use a dedicated alias for cookiebeggars and registration mofos who won’t let you see their content. Another alias for a pathetic spamming shopping site etc. They have a mail client for all platforms so no issue with accessibility. The email has calendar, bookmarking, note taking and other small managerial stuff too. I recomend this approach.
I’ve started using similar services recently but it was a bit too late haha
“Breached” implies that sensitive data, like payment details, private communication, or physical addresses, were leaked. Instead, this is just semi-public stuff like email/username/name. Maybe a better title would be “15M Trello users have been identified (name/email)”
Of course. But are you sure “identified” is correct word here? I chose “breached” because title of mail was “You’re one of 15,111,945 people pwned in the Trello data breach”
I think it’s reasonable that you chose that title based on the email header, and I also think it’s very irresponsible of haveibeenpwned to send out an email with that subject line. They absolutely should know better.
That’s not what it means to breach an account…
How about “leaked”? I chose “breached” because title of mail was “You’re one of 15,111,945 people pwned in the Trello data breach”
