How does anyone seriously trust LastPass anymore? Years ago, I was working for a company handling bank data. They were using LP immediately following a previous LP security incident and had no plans to migrate away.
A lot of people and orgs don't use security products for security. They use them for security theater. A vast majority of people, even many security people, will never hear about this breach. So LastPass still works great for them.
I think a lot of people use products like LastPass because it makes storing passwords easier. Works on mobile, computer, tablet. Pretty good experience tbh.
With something like LastPass it's also much easier to create unique strong passwords for other sites.
Also, let's be real:
> The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
I'm pretty sure 99% of the people on exposed have already had their names, phone numbers, email and physical addresses leaked already. This has nothing to do with the security of your passwords stored in LP. They have some CRM, some person from their 800 employees clicked a sketchy link and it leaked that. It's not good, but its hardly an indictment of their product or usefulness
> I think a lot of people use products like LastPass because it makes storing passwords easier. Works on mobile, computer, tablet. Pretty good experience tbh.
> With something like LastPass it's also much easier to create unique strong passwords for other sites.
Sure, but LastPass, in addition to being the least secure option, doesn't even have a good user interface, and it's expensive. There are dozens of other password managers out there, each one better than LastPass in every way.
Changing all your passwords after you switch so they aren't potentially exposed in the next LastPass break takes time and energy.
People have a lot of things going on and have to make a decision about whether the risk justifies the effort.
Then there's feature gaps. LastPass is available on all platforms, has convenient sharing, a good story for emergency recovery if I'm incapacitated and want family to get access to things, and support for 2FA options such as Yubikey. Most competitors lack at least some of those, which is an issue if you're relying on them.
Personally, I left Lastpass for 1Password several breaches ago, but it took me a couple weeks of research to decide where to move to, at least a week of changing passwords on sites afterwards, and however much time and energy it took me to help others who I share credentials with switch at the same time.
Security Best Practices change all the time. Failing to implement MFA because "it takes time and energy" and "besides we implemented 12 character, complex passwords years ago" will not be valid excuses for government regulators when they come knocking.
Password managers are entirely a UX problem waiting to be solved better. Every time I hit a UX bug with my password manager, I mutter that I could do fix that, and then know that mine would also be worse in so many ways just to reach parity. What I wish is there was a public bug tracker of UX issues/optimizations that I, and the rest of the world, could log ideas to. Password managers are such a good idea but they all need just that much more work to be seamless.
Can you give me an example of a UX problem that you attribute to the password manager? That'd help me understand.
I often hit problems with 1Password's autofill on particular websites, but by and large I blame the website. Few examples:
* one website expects me to type the PIN then a Symantec VIP OTP token into a single field called "password". That's a (possibly deliberately) password manager-hostile design. I finally got annoyed with it enough to use an open source project called `python-vipaccess` to create a proper `otpauth://totp/...` URL I could add into 1Password and wrote a TamperMonkey script that added separate autofillable fields that would get concatenated automatically. Now 1Password works fine.
* frequently websites will complain about needing a valid credit card number after autofill. I have to go to the field, delete the last digit, add it back, tab away, then it works. I think they have just used the wrong event handlers and never tested it with autofill.
* they often will skip `autocomplete="new-password"` attributes, so my password manager will look for a (nonexistent) current password rather than prompting me for a new one, and/or they won't have the username and new password fields ever in the DOM at the same time so the password manager doesn't save it properly. (Even if it makes sense in terms of user-visible flow to do these in sequence, they can still leave the username in as a hidden form element for the benefit of the password manager.)
I've also hit UX problems in 1Password itself, for example the "quick access" pop-up doesn't reliably appear on the current Space in macOS. (Confusing and annoying to have to switch to another to see it.) But they seem less common.
Thanks for the feedback. It's certainly a challenge to make 1Password work on every website that exists, and even more so to keep it working over time, especially with old items that people created years ago which no longer match the site. We do have a whole "filling and saving" team dedicated to the problem, and we do follow up when users report issues with sites.
I'd love to look into the Quick Access placement. It is supposed to appear on all spaces and sets an NSWindow property to do so. Is there anything particular that you think triggers it (multi-monitor, full screen apps, etc)?
> I'd love to look into the Quick Access placement. It is supposed to appear on all spaces and sets an NSWindow property to do so. Is there anything particular that you think triggers it (multi-monitor, full screen apps, etc)?
Thanks! I haven't seen it in a while, so maybe it's been fixed by either a 1Password or macOS update or is specific to a setting I since changed. But I'll keep my eyes out for if it happens again. I do have a multi-monitor setup.
I do see right now that if I'm on a full-screen app, 1Password's quick access window doesn't show up; if I move to the next space over I see it for a moment and then it disappears. In contrast, Spotlight search will actually pop up directly over my full-screen app, though knowing Apple they could be using some private API for this behavior.
These are tiny paper cuts that add up to pain, like the ones you mentioned that affect me/a tiny portion of the user base so they aren't worth fixing. Is the justification I'm sure that's being made. For example, if site auto detection that you're submitting a form fails that you laboriously have to add field elements in and if the editor is on a different workspace on mac you have to go to the application space/desktop than three finger swipe back to the browser space/desktop and then back to the application space/desktop and then back-and-forth to fill in four different security questions. Tiny stuff like that that really adds up, that make password manager usage go down.
> These are tiny paper cuts that add up to pain, like the ones you mentioned that affect me/a tiny portion of the user base so they aren't worth fixing. Is the justification I'm sure that's being made.
I think it's not only that but also that making site-specific changes (as I did with a TamperMonkey script) is fragile and could get them into trouble if their changes do the wrong thing (immediately for everyone, for some users, or after some site change). Might be better from their perspective to honor the site's stated intent even if that intent is questionable. In my top example, the "password" field actually is a password if the user hasn't enabled 2FA, so the changes I made wouldn't work for 1Password to apply to everyone. They could detect the label "PIN + Token" to gate it, but what if that text changes in a redesign or is sometimes localized into another language? and so on.
In the broadest sense, I agree there are big UX problems, but how much should we expect the password manager to do unilaterally? fwiw even when a bunch of players got together to make broader changes, we ended up with passkeys, which are far from perfect in many ways. (The flows about scanning a QR code from one device to another, without necessarily even knowing which device has a working passkey for that site... the simultaneous confusing offers of different ways of signing in... try talking your vision-impaired father through that over the phone.)
> if the editor is on a different workspace on mac you have to go to the application space/desktop than three finger swipe back to the browser space/desktop and then back to the application space/desktop and then back-and-forth to fill in four different security questions.
Yeah, that sounds similar to my own complaint about quick access opening on the wrong Space, just applied to the main window instead. And of course when you have to use the security questions something else has gone really wrong, like the main password having changed on the site without having changed in your password manager.
* One way I've seen this is when people have overlapped usage in two different password managers (1Password vs either Google Passwords or Apple Passwords). They have import and export (except for passkeys), but it'd be nice if they had an incremental version to help you get out of this mess if you weren't disciplined in switching over all at once.
* Another is that when you change the site's password even while using the password manager, the actual site change and recording it in the password manager's database is hardly transactional. You can click the password manager's update pop-up even if it failed, or not notice it even if it succeeded. Again not really sure how they would address this unilaterally.
> I just hit one. Creating a new document in 1Password, the name of the document isn't preselected, so I have to hit delete to name it. Lots of little tiny shit like that.
I can't expect them to serve every website on the Internet, but a button on 1Password that was in the context menu for the extension that was "report this site is not working 100% perfectly", and they had a team to come in and check up on the site and extract way to improve their software.
I remember another stupid annoyance. There was one site where passwords were limited to eight characters but the way they password manager entered the passwords. It passed more than the characters along as the password so the password would fail if it auto filled, but if I copy and pasted or typed it manually it would work because the JavaScript had a chance to truncate. The fact that this site was limited to eight character passwords all other conversation, but that was super annoying until I figured it out.
Anyway. I have a love/hate relationship with my password manager.
(I'm Mitch from 1Password.) I do appreciate reading about these kinds of paper cuts and always follow up on them when I see them. We are going to address the item title issue next week, so thank you for that one.
It's true that sometimes very small/simple issues that affect some portiion of people can go for a long time. I'd like to find a better way of identifying these and getting to them quicker than just crawling through HN posts. If you have any thoughts or at least issues you'd like us to look into, always open to hear more.
I just hit one. Creating a new document in 1Password, the name of the document isn't preselected, so I have to hit delete to name it. Lots of little tiny shit like that.
1Password checks all these boxes and hasn't yet had a data breach.
Their biggest security hole is probably somewhere in the operational pipeline between 1P browser client developers and the static file servers hosting them.
Unfortunately it's one of the most bug-ridden and unreliable pieces of software I've ever used. I encounter issues with it on a daily basis, but the burden of switching and a lack of superior options keeps me locked in.
I stopped paying them when they killed local valuts, and secondarily when then moved away from native apps. I drifted along on the old 7.x client for awhile with local values.
I've more or less switched to apple keychain/passwords at this point. I need a solution for linux, and have been thinking about some kind of simple 1-way sync issue that dumps stuff from keychain into some other tool for use on linux.
Curious if you have any gripes or concerns about using the Apple keychain/passwords setup. Aside from Apple devices, do you mostly also stick with Safari? Was it hard to transition things like TOTP or passkeys?
i mostly stick to firefox I do some management of moving some passwords back and forth (i'm not yet using the firefox extension for apple passwords because i just learned about it).. but because i use firefox on my phone as well.. nbd.
In terms of TOTP I just use googleauth and oathtool.
It was a fantastic, fast, reliable piece of software until they sold out for VC funding and went the Electron rebuild route.
I was a paying customer for 15 years and migrated away with the last price increases due to "AI-powered functionalities" and the new features making the product worse on top of already being salty over when they stopped the one-time licenses in favor of subscription.
Used it for years and never encountered a single bug, and I'm quite a power user with hundreds of items stored in it, shared vaults, and access multiple times per day. It's one of the few softwares I happily pay for.
Maybe it differs from platform to platform, otherwise I can't explain your comment.
Their flow for regaining access after somehow "disauthorised" laptop, she there's an installed but unused for months plugin is one of the most infuriating.
It won't ask me for my secret key, which I have an can provide immediately, no, it won't allow me to authenticate myself with the phone, because our enterprise vault logs off quickly, I must however do a some absurdly obscure dance because FY, that's why.
> I think a lot of people use products like LastPass because it makes storing passwords easier. Works on mobile, computer, tablet. Pretty good experience tbh.
Yeah but wanting a product like LastPass doesn't require that you use LastPass. There are many good alternatives.
What's the solution? Don't have a CRM and store stuff about customers under lock and key? Don't give access to the CRM to any employees? More security training about clicking shady links?
I don't get how you think some other competitor would be better suited against this threat. The right solution is to mitigate the damage. CRM has minimum available stuff, like names, addresses, etc. Don't keep stuff like payment information, passwords, etc in that place as that's the vulnerable system. It seems like that's what LP does and probably every other company in this space does.
Again, it's entirely reasonable to have an off the shelf CRM, pretty broad access to it. You try to prevent phishing email or phone scams (assuming this is what it was) but you have 800 employees, its bound to happen.
Brand damage and lost of trust from customers are consequences of security breaches. I'm not saying don't have a CRM, but I am saying don't complain when the customer data in your CRM leaks and customers complain. LastPass has had several such breaches over the years, and I think people are right to say that the company has a reputation of poor security hygiene.
By all means, have a CRM. But consider that it probably doesn't need to be as broadly accessible as you think it does, and consider that the people with access to it probably need to be held to a higher standard.
“On June 12th, LastPass was made aware of an incident that occurred at Klue (klue.com), a third-party market intelligence platform utilized by our go-to-market teams, which integrates with our Salesforce and Gong systems,” LastPass says.
"We immediately launched an investigation and learned that, as part of this incident, an unauthorized actor was able to obtain OAuth tokens Klue held for many of its customers, including LastPass.”
“The threat actor then used these credentials to access LastPass customer data within our Salesforce environment.”
That's a npm supply chain attack style but next level for the Enterprise game: hack one and get access to everything of all of them since they are all unrestricted connected and with each other.
And then they force us to install cloudstrike, antiviruses and client side monitoring because "us are the security problem".
When their CRM and support systems are improperly secured, it doesn't bode well for the security of their vaults. When attackers infiltrate one system, it's easier to laterally move to other systems.
Also, their marketing systems are also a mess. I've unsubscribed from their marketing emails multiple times, but to date I'm still getting marketing emails from them even though I'm no longer a customer. Even contacting their support about this issue hasn't helped.
Assuming you are in EU you could report them to local DPA. Objection (i.e. unsubscribing. Original automatic subscription may or or may not have been legal) to direct marketing is pretty much absolute due to GDPR Article 21(2), I'm not aware of any "workaround" companies have successfully managed to argue.
In the US you can report it to FTC for CAN-SPAM violations, but don't hold your breath on any enforcement.
> I'm pretty sure 99% of the people on exposed have already had their names, phone numbers, email and physical addresses leaked already. This has nothing to do with the security of your passwords stored in LP. They have some CRM, some person from their 800 employees clicked a sketchy link and it leaked that. It's not good, but its hardly an indictment of their product or usefulness
Would you be okay will a public database of all people's names, emails, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact details? After all, most people's data have already been leaked somewhere. Credit reporting agencies have leaked more sensitive data. I, for one, still expect companies to keep my private data private. Especially companies who's started purpose is to keep my secrets secret. It's a bad look for them and if I trusted them this would make me lose my trust in them. But, they already lost my trust two or three (I lost count) breeches ago.
I agree the ship has sailed but I have no desire to make it easier for people to spam me or social engineer any of my accounts. If they want to send some crypto to some stangers on the internet to do it, I can't stop that, but I am not going to hand the info to them on a silver platter.
Where I’m from there actually were guides like this of the whole country, published once a year, I think even into the early 2000s. They stopped doing it for cost savings, but this type of information being public is considered fairly normal by many, as long as you have the ability to unsubscribe.
my ssn (usa) and my credit info (also usa) was already leaked in a data breach. i don't care about my encrypted blob in lastpass being leaked because it's computationally too expensive to crack it (assuming it's not a targeted attack with hostile nation-state level gpu capacity)
Yes, a public database like this would be acceptable. That way the info isn't paywalled behind some white pages site or similar. And then maybe I could even update my own info to be correct. Contact info is pretty much out there for most people already. Hell, I put it on my resume and send that out to many people and put it on public sites.
I am glad you want the world to know your phone number, but not everyone does.
Since we still use SMS as second factors (or primary, as some in this thread said they don't write down passwords but just use password reset links to login), it's not the best security hygiene
> I think a lot of people use products like LastPass because it makes storing passwords easier. Works on mobile, computer, tablet. Pretty good experience tbh.
What you are describing is a password manager. No one here is questioning why people would use a password manager. That's like asking why people would use a toothbrush. The question is why anyone would use LastPass as their password manager.
> Also, let's be real:
> > The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
> I'm pretty sure 99% of the people on exposed have already had their names, phone numbers, email and physical addresses leaked already.
I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but this comment strikes me as really baffling.
LastPass has a very long history of breaches, some of them very severe with a big fallout. It's at the point where the yearly LastPass breach has become a meme just like the yearly T-Mobile breach. It makes no sense whatsoever to look at this incidence without that context and to claim "it's not that bad, they only leaked xyz".
On another note, of course does a breach tell something about the security practices of a password manager company. You really want the developer of your password manager to have good security practices and any sign to the contrary is concerning even when it is not directly related to the core product. Of course security is not about absolutes and mistakes and incidents do happen – what counts is how, how is dealt with them and if they repeat. In the case of LastPass history, including this breach, shows that they have atrocious security and you do not want to let your credentials get any millimeter closer to them than you can possibly avoid.
> I'm pretty sure 99% of the people on exposed have already had their names, phone numbers, email and physical addresses leaked already.
Again, I'm sorry for being so direct, but this argument annoys me greatly: This argument – that others have done similar bad already and similar harm has already been done – is beyond stupid and needs to die. It's why slippery slopes are real. It's the reason why normalization of bad things happen. It's what people with bad intentions continuously use with great success to slowly make their bad deeds socially acceptable.
When my neighbor dumps his trash on the street that does not allow me to do the same and does not make it any better if I do. I will be just as much in the wrong as him. The only difference being – when I use that excuse – that I will also be a coward.
The wrongdoing of others is never an apology to do the same; and just because something bad is normal does not make it any better and it is especially not an argument for making it even worse.
If you want to be a security vendor reseller, just make sure to sell to orgs that have a compliance requirement, either by law or similar.
Do you sell firewalls? sell them to banks or something. Anti-malware endpoints? Insurances too. SIEMs? payment gateways for their PCI DSS environments.
Price it just below what would be the fine for not complying, that way you maximize the invoice.
I stopped playing the security vendor reseller game because it got too boring this way to make money.
And it will continue until we can sue company being breached for criminal negligence. Should a single company executive be personally liable in these situations, the scale of the problem would be orders of magnitude less severe because they would spend the appropriate amount of effort to cover their damn ass.
This is it. These companies don't really care about their customer's data. Their SDLC is no more rigorous than any other SaaS product. They have junior people and (now) AI pushing code with a quick "LGTM" PR check just like everyone else.
The way to stop this is to have actual consequences for the decision makers here. You can build high-integrity software and some fields (avionics) have done it. But the organization needs to be built from the ground up to do it and nobody's going to do it if you can just get breached and offer a phony apology over and over again.
It is inertia. Customers are sticky, they do not switch unless they have to. If you're an enterprise, you have to go through establishing a new vendor relationship, onboarding a new password vault with your IT team, communicate it across the org, migrate data from the old password vault to the new password vault, etc. There is a real cost in time and resources to do this, and so, many avoid it until they have no other choice.
Lastpass is owned by PE. Why? Because Francisco Partners and Elliott Management bought a cashflow that is sticky. Its why most software companies were acquired by PE prior to the Cambrian explosion of generative AI.
Moving to another solution involves some expense and operational risk (changing procedures, increased human error rates, locking yourself out). Even though the risk of staying with the existing solution goes from "unlikely" to "possible" (so maybe from yellow/amber to red), a lot of companies rationalize it as "but now the provider will be extra careful so the likelihood is actually lower".
Crowdstrike had a famous incident and is still probably #2 in the cybersecurity world. Sometimes assessing risk is a funny business.
I worked for a big company that switched from 1password to Keeper. The transition was smooth and I do not see why it shouldn’t be as long as IT knows what they are doing.
True, but how come such risks are addressable when adding AI or opening up to yet another API or when some savings are promised with a new product/product feature?
> when adding AI ... or when some savings are promised
Because savings are promised. And who could say no to AI? (/s)
There's always some risk mitigation possible but it's costly or inconvenient. Companies pretend the risk is lower so they can do whatever they wanted to do but now with less accountability. The risk matrix says so.
But sometimes the tradeoff is genuinely not worth it. The bottom line is that each company has to do it's own calculations and decide whether moving is overall a better choice. Which risk is higher, that your provider is breached again or that you have new operational issues with the new solution. Which costs more, a chance of another security issue, or the guaranteed expense of replacing the solution? You do the same math at home all the time. Your washing machine leaked once, do you replace everything or just patch the hole?
Well, these types of companies typically carry cyber incident insurance. If there was, say, a ransomware attack, the carrier is going to bring in a forensic team to investigate. If it is determined that there was negligence, like not patching a system, that will be used to deny a claim. This might be a little different from the lastpass situation in that it's an untrustworthy vendor, but there's still significant exposure.
If this bank were my client, I would make sure that the decision-makers were aware.
"We need to be able to answer an RFP that asks "do you have a comprehensive credential management system?"."
Just like a previous employer I had, on background checks. "We need to run one. We don't care what you did or didn't do, if you're doing good work for us. But some of our customers require that we have performed them."
Because procurement is hard. Changing vendors is a big undertaking for big companies. They are certainly not going to be switching vendors every time there is an incident
Also use them as a password manager like an advanced version of Excel that fills in the passwords for you. Security isn't part of it. I have the feeling LastPass agrees.
If the passwords are still not known, the "breach" is not a fail for the end user. If the master password to the vault is secure, and the only way to the vault is still only through the master password, it's still doing what the end user wants it to do. "Breach" is meaningless without qualifiers.
I’ve done a lot of security consulting work for hundreds of companies and one thing I noticed is that the companies that actually took security seriously were the ones that had been breached in the past. Until the execs and board see the dollar impact themself and not just read about it, the security program never gets the funds it needs.
I’m not saying I recommend LastPass for that reason, but I wouldn’t write them off for that reason.
There are lots of types of a “breach”. The first and second (the major ones) were likely related so more like one continuous incident. This one was a vendor breach that had access to their data so not a reflection of their security program as much as the first.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying you can’t tell from this incident.
Weirdly being a security company actually can have the opposite affect. A small portion of potential customers or investors assume the company is more secure because they are a security company after all (and should be); therefore, the customer's security review are less stringent so exec can get away with smaller internal security budgets. Of course good security companys with good leadership doesn't do that... but those aren't the big companies.
it's "trivial" in the sense of "I can launch the app in 2 minutes," but "non-trivial" in the sense of "I have a working, synced password manager across my devices with good security practices."
>but "non-trivial" in the sense of "I have a working, synced password manager across my devices
Is that actually something the average person needs? Do they create new accounts ever day or week that they need to have on all device immediately? Merging DBs is like a 2 minute exercise at best.
I would argue the friction is a good thing. "Do I actually need to give yet another website information about myself for an account?" The answer is no more often than not.
Yes I know people don't care but those who don't are not using a password manager.
KeePassXC might do what someone needs, and I really appreciate the work of its developers, but when advocating KeePassXC, I should also acknowledge that the "UX" is rough in parts:
1. It has lots of features and complexity, but doesn't always convey affordances for common use cases to the user.
2. Some of the UI design feels very incrementally developed (naturally), and the implementation a bit quirky in parts.
(For one of many examples, when I had to do something involving adding TOTP secrets, once I found where to add them, I had to be careful in which sequence I clicked things, or it would just discard the secret I already put in the right place. If I hadn't been watching carefully, I might not have noticed immediately that it did this, and not been able to restore the secret before it was lost.)
Of course, in an ideal world, one would like to do a great holistic rethinking of the UI design (while preserving the data model), but that's a ton of work.
When advocating it to a "technical" person (who is not scared of, say, a legacy IDE), I would say it might do everything they need. When advocating to an ordinary user, I would look at their use cases, and see what they are going to see, and how confusing or quirky that might be for them.
KeepassXC comes with its own share of risks (supply-chain attacks, zero-day vulnerability detections etc). No matter, which 3p software you are using, you are effectively gambling on the chance that none of those risks materialize. The only alternative is to personally audit the code - library by library, script by script and build it yourself. But even that carries risks: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
If I keep a KeepassXC database on a set of devices, sync'd using syncthing, then for a large range of threats I'd need to be a target of interest.
This is in contrast to LastPass which is going to attract a ton of blackhat attention.
Yes, supply chain attacks are possible but they're equally possible for lastpass.
Switching to a self-hosted solution isn't perfect. Nothing is, and pointing that out isn't particularly useful.
What it does do is eliminate whole class of threats: large scale, broad based attacks against a single, high value target.
In fact I'd argue writing passwords down in a notebook or putting them in a naked text file on your computer is better than trusting a centralized service like LP.
Of course, if you are a target of interest, the calculus changes entirely.
Passbolt and Bitwarden can be self-hosted on top of offering the usuals pros like MFA, an API incl. integrations (e.g. https://external-secrets.io/latest/provider/passbolt/) and a better UX that does not involve syncing files between team members
Having your own auth workflow was instant fail with the well architected framework committee. Using Okta was instant pass.
I don't necessarily disagree with that policy but given that Okta was breached several times while I was working there, it was interesting the extent to which our CSO had blinders about it.
Liability is the answer! If you build an auth system and it fails, it's your backside. If Okta fails, it's theirs. Enterprises buy products as much as they buy protection from problems.
e.g. when Crowdstrike takes down Windows across the worlds or AWS east coast falls over everybody hurts. At that point the story is easy, you point at the broken thing, mumble something about improving resilience, and everyone just moves on.
Roll your own system and have it taken down / breached specifically? There's noone to point at. It's hard to make the narrative anything except it being your fault.
You have (the perception of having) someone to forward the claim to once you're hit by one where the damages are quantified in money like a life insurance or disability payout caused by the data loss?
As someone that is not really in the game, does Okta have such a bad track record, and are there alternatives that are considered solid? From the outside, it seemed like EntraID is a bit of a burning dumpster fire, while Okta seemed expensive, but usable and decent (from comments I read)
The current default for lazy enterprise customers seems to be an unholy tangle of Active Directory, Entra, and Okta. If you use all three it's 3x more secure, right?
What's the risk, and does that change by moving to an alternative?
Companies deal with leaked secrets a lot. A company already using a password manager is ahead of the game.
Suppose they move to a competitor. That's a migration and training that someone has to drive. What do they gain? Another company that can also have exploits? Or they self-host, and now have to fund that, and still potentially get exploits?
Ultimately, this likely isn't that big of a deal for a company.
And they have to weigh it up against all the other things that they can be doing.
You pretty much export your data from lastpass and import it into 1password. The only thing it doesn't do is have 1password log into your lastpass account and pull it out itself.
I remember ten years ago telling our so-called leaders that the data will get leaked from LastPass. They were all gung-ho about it being secure blah de blah. Luckily most of us don't work there anymore.
If you think I'm going to try and get my mom onto a different password manager, after it took literally ten years to migrate her away from the printed list in her purse...
Enterprise IT is all about outsourcing enterprise IT
nobody cares, there’s like 2 people whose job it is to care, one works for your company and one works for the third party IT company - and maybe your company’s General Counsel but even they just care that your CTO said they care
everyone else just has whatever enteprise service was presented to them
Lots more companies affected. Some more listed below:
>"Klue has not said how many of its hundreds of customers are affected. Several companies have come forward to confirm they had data stolen during the attack, including Gong, Jamf, HackerOne, Insurity, OneTrust, Recorded Future, Snyk, Sprout Social, and Tanium."
>Cybercrime group Icarus took credit for the breach, saying on its leak site that it will publish the stolen data on Monday if the company does not pay the hackers’ ransom."
> The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
WTF is LastPasd doing, handing customer details to a market research company? Any such data should have been fully anonymized: no names, no specific addresses, etc..
For anyone looking for a recommendation: I use KeepassXC with Keepass2Android. Open source, with a local database that you can choose to sync (or not). I sync using Own cloud.
I self host everything but email and credentials. Email because I already have a full time job, and credentials because if an emergency is sufficient enough to remove me from my hardware, that’s when I’ll need my passwords the most.
To be fair, I could just sync the db somewhere safe.
I've been using pwsafe for years. Also free and open source. Local-only vault. No cloud service to depend on that's going to incompetently lose your data. You can optionally store your vault in dropbox or iCloud drive, but why would you?
This is what I've been using for a long time now. It's probably too technical for most people, especially if you're talking about syncing across multiple devices, but that's not a problem for me.
As much as the collective dumping on LastPass for yet another breach, and how they're totally irresponsible for handing customer data to some third party is amusing.
I think if people took a moment to actually look at what happened, they might realise that the story everyone has in their heads is quite different from reality.
Klue is one of those CRM services that so many sales teams are using. Yes, you have to hand them customer records (email of the customer contacts, finance teams, etc). That show Klue delivers it's "market intelligence" thing about that customer.
If you go to your sales teams and see what random stuff they have hooked up to your systems, I bet you will find similar things.
Whether or not this is a good idea (I firmly dislike it), this is how sales teams work these days. If you try to take it away you will be fighting the entire sales organisation.
I am more surprised that these breaches don't happen more often.
It doesn't impact LastPass's actual password databases.
(No affiliation with any of the entities involved in this)
I'm sure this is worse than using lastpass in some way
but for the past couple years I've just generated and forgotten 90% of my passwords. the final 10% I keep in a password manager. But if the service isn't really that important I just use the 'forgot my password' to change and generate a new password every time I need to login
This works if the account doesn't have 2FA. On my last side project app users can login only via email OTP. There are security downsides with that, someone can send phishing link and use OTP submitted to the fake site, but the app doesn't store anything sensitive (it's a game which tracks your progress) so I guess it's not a major security risk.
But the phone number you have is not 100% in your control. I had AT&T flub something and I lost my number and they assigned me a new one (I was chanting my plan just after they did some merging with someone). Granted its unlikely but I would still use defense in depth and not have password reset be my only login method.
Manually forward the magic mail to an address which you can use on your laptop/desktop for that purpose only.
Even though i understand your consideration of separating regular access and reset onto different devices, im am still more sceptical about smartphone security than anything else. What happens when someone gets access to your phone? They could redirect and use the magic mails too.
I've been an Enpass user for years because I got a lifetime purchase for a good deal. They don't host the cloud services for syncing passwords. Instead you just auth your cloud storage (I use Google Drive) and it syncs to that.
This approach seems better to me. For one thing, I'd already be screwed if someone malicious got into my Google account, probably worse than if they got into my password manager. And additionally, this means they're not creating an absolute jackpot of data to breach in a centralized place. No one's gonna hack Enpass of all their passwords because that would require hacking all of Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, etc. and looking for the files manually.
> No one's gonna hack Enpass of all their passwords because that would require hacking all of Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, etc. and looking for the files manually.
Or they compromise their self-update system if that exists.
As another happy Enpass user I don't think it is significantly different. The exception being that the KeePass frontends are really just as expensive as Enpass is now.
I also got a good deal on the lifetime pro membership before they moved to more of an annual model, which factors into my decision.
Which Keepass frontend do you use (if you use one on mobile)? Keepassium and Strongbox seem to be the ones that people talk about, but they are pricey too. I don't know anything about AuthPass, but I'm reluctant to use a free product; I'd rather use an inexpensive one, just to hopefully thwart supply chain attacks on that front.
any company that stuck around (or began using) lastpass after vaults were leaked probably does not care about this one at all, considering its just CRM data.
i can sympathize a little bit with companies that stick with lastpass. when i had to switch an org from lastpass to 1password, it was a massive undertaking and incredibly annoying. however, i have no sympathy for anyone who has chosen lastpass after 2022.
The non-story here is the data is of minor criticality.
The real story is is that however minor, you expect LastPass to be better. They’re a password storage company, in order to be trusted they need to be better than this.
This isn't great but it's not that big of a deal either. A lot of companies got bit by the Klue breach but it's not like your vaults are being accessed.
My point is the same - nothing about this breach implies vault access, it explicitly is related to the Klue breach, which contains some customer PII.
> If you lost data it was because you used a weak master password for that vault.
Even this is more complex (horrible pbkdf2 defaults, you're welcome for getting lastpass to increase them btw that was me) but it isn't relevant, no vaults are accessed in this breach.
Alternate revenue source to keep them in business as they probably hemorrhage customers due to being maybe the least secure password manager ever? I have to wonder how they have any customers left at all at this point
No, Klue is a competitive intelligence tool for sellers. You use it to keep track of "battle cards" (i.e. if they are selling a deal vs. 1Password, sales rep would go into Klue to see what the advantages of LastPass are vs that specific competitor).
It's a purpose specific knowledge base, not a data broker or any sort. But it will surely have information of who you sold to or tried to sell to because of it.
>“On June 12th, LastPass was made aware of an incident that occurred at Klue (klue.com), a third-party market intelligence platform utilized by our go-to-market teams, which integrates with our Salesforce and Gong systems,”
The specific dependency that gets companies infected, and the optics that result, are so important. There have been sillier examples, but you can see how in this case, the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their main and only product.
So this couldn't have happened to bitwarden, you own the reputation loss if any of your suppliers get owned. Though it really doesn't matter anymore for LastPass they leaked their customers vaults before, I have no idea how they can still be in business.
Generally yes, if you want to use a Customer Relationship Management system like Salesforce. Customer names, contact information, and info about what they bought from you is table stakes data for CRM is it not?
If you are selling B2B or high ticket items, sure. But these are customers of a security product. It's as silly as running the names of mcdonalds customers through an AI to find hidden sales insights
It's worth noting that this is not 'their marketing provider' what they do is load 30 different providers for some reason, to maximize the reach of their data sharing and advertising network. Well, their network reached too far and touched an infected node.
> the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their […] product
To be fair, and I don’t want to, supposedly the only thing that was compromised was contact info. No vaults were exfiltrated or unlocked (as far as the article info goes).
So this is really just another very boring info breach, not a targeted password-stealing hack.
Did lastpass also pull the dumbass 'no local vaults' move that 1password made? One of the nice things about a 'bring your own vault syncing' is that breaches like this don't have to mean a goddamned thing to you.
Not for this data, but in the past, yes - there is persistent pressure to do that for any maker of password managers, be it independent, in-browser or in-OS. (Source: I was a cofounder of a company that made a password manager as part of our product).
For folks new to the KeePass ecosystem, it’s KeePassXC[0] now. The original KeePass is still developed as well, however KeePassXC is a cross-platform updated version.
One of the security advantages of KeePass being just a file is that you can sync it in the way that makes sense to you.
The need to have an opinion on how you’d like to sync a file does, as you suggest, eliminate some portion of the population who need a fully baked answer in one step.
I used to use Google Drive, but now I use Syncthing, further reducing my exposure. Paired with Synctrain and KeePassium on iOS.
One tip: enable the atomic save option in settings to reduce the risk of weird cloud sync issues.
The mobile app is quite good, it works and gets out of your way. I use it on Android.
For syncing, I do it manually with rsync. Given the database is 1 file it's easy to move around. You can rsync / scp it over, use a USB cable, use cloud storage, etc..
I use a password manager in a "read many, write infrequently" way so I don't mind occasionally syncing it as needed.
These threads are always filled with keepass people who will tell you how great it is and not mention that you’re on your fucking own for you know Miner things like syncing or mobile use.
I’m sure it works for many people to Dropbox their vault around anytime they want to access something and manually handle copies and sync. I’m not nearly so naive as to think that has any degree of success outside tech bubbled people.
I have yet to meet a KeePass user under the illusion that the syncing story is a good fit for everyone.
But we are prioritizing “can’t” over “won’t” in terms of provider access to our credentials. That’s why these hack-related threads tend to draw folks who will remind you that other tradeoffs exist.
For a technical audience like HN, “can work out how to sync a file” is a decent assumption to make.
Why anyone would even consider using an online password manager is beyond me. Keepass works perfectly offline, and it's easy to sync. Just copy one file. I set up syncthing on my pc and phone and I basically just forget about it. For other places I have a particular subdomain (guid) where I serve the current copy of the file, gated by a password. The database itself is protected by both a password and a yubikey.
I, like many others, wanted to move off of LP but was too lazy. So I just exported my passwords and put them into Google Sheets. While I have rotated many of those passwords (especially the important ones) and put them into a better password manager, there are several I haven't — and they've remained safer in Google Sheets than in LP.
The lesson here is to get off of LP ASAP, you can figure out where to go later.
You put your passwords in Google Sheets? The data there is not encrypted at rest. Google has 191k employees in countries like China, India, and Pakistan who could potentially access your records. Make sure you use something that encrypts your data at rest, preferably on a device you own and control.
I put my passwords in Google Sheets temporarily. Then I moved them to 1Password, except the throwaway stuff.
Google accounts aren’t immune to being compromised, so I agree that it’s not a good home for passwords (without even the need to invoke internal threats) — but it felt safer than LastPass. Which ought to be an embarrassment.
I had exactly this happen to me, suffered great monetary losses and had my identity stolen. I've learnt my lesson and have moved on to 1password.
At the end of it I couldn't help but reflect on my foolishness. I realised just how much better I would've felt if only it had been an American, Canadian, or European Googler who stole my data. It really is the worst when malicious entities are Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani. Just the worst!!! (/s)
I was just making the change from LP to BW yesterday, completely by coincidence. My first reaction is that the out-of-box experience is poor.
The first step was easy. The account creation and import of legacy data all went pretty well. But after that it wasn't so pretty.
The first hurdle was trying to understand their model for sharing data (so my wife and I can share important credentials). The model that LastPass uses is pretty intuitive to me: it's just a matter of sharing a folder, so relatively transparent. But Bitwarden has a whole separate concept of "organization", and the items being managed don't go in "folders" here, but in "collections". So there are two separate, and subtly different, models in play, and this is confusing. The good news is that the client aggregates the data so when you're using it day-to-day to fill login forms, you don't have to worry about the differences.
Once I'd gotten the data in place, I had to get the clients set up on the various platforms (browser extensions; desktop native, which is actually required for the browser extension's security to work right; phone). The OoB settings were entirely paranoid, and had me re-entering the complex master password over and over, really annoying me. Figuring out how to get to a reasonable balance required figuring out some settings whose labels are misleading. For example, "Unlock with PIN" sounded to me like it was going to add an extra layer of security, but it turns out that it really means "allow unlock using PIN in lieu of master password".
Also, note that while most of the settings default to paranoia-level (like the "require master password every time I inhale", that I mentioned above), you will probably want to change the default crypto cypher. It defaults to PBKDF2, but a better modern approach is the other choice, Argon2id.
...which also reminds me that there's a distinct lack of parity between client platforms. Although you need the desktop native app to manage browser extension security, there's a bunch it can't do. For example, after importing my legacy data, I needed to select all the contents of my LP shared folders and move them to the BW organization collection, but the native app (which seems to be an Electron app, btw) doesn't have a multi-select feature; you need to do that in the online web app.
I can see how any password manager can be safe. Especially from supply chain attacks. I use password safe on android, it writes an encrypted file locally. I'd really like to be able to flat seal the app to prevent network access. But I don't think android has such a feature.
Anyone still using lastpass in 2026 deserves this, I'm sorry but this company has proven time and time again they should not be trusted. I migrated off them years ago after one of these breaches and haven't looked back since.
Theres enough information here for enterprising people to commit blackmail.
The companies responsible for these lapses of security should be paying, starting first with investors, then the C-suite. That'll put a stop to this negligence VERY quickly.
Why not just use a browser based password manager? Just works. You need only one tool that gets updated. And Browser vendors are extremely vigilant about security. All platforms covered.
This has become all too common with lastpass. I migrated out during their last incident.
I wonder how does it keep happening and how do customers still continue.
I "just" use google chrome password manager for "everything".. yes im sure it horrifies some HN ppl but my thinking is, from all the password managers out there, does anyone one spend more on security or hire better security ppl or have access to better security tools and infra than google (yes yes im sure outliers and some counter examples exists).
I routinely die a little inside when i see my gf (none techie) try and remember which one of her fav 3-5 often used passwords she has used for site/service abc as she tries to login.
Kinda tongue in cheek, I always tell her if you can remember your password it's a bad one !
Private company third party password managers are bad. Across the board. They're a bad idea.
Deeply localized actual best practices can help solve this. Private companies can also help, but only if it isn't in the form of "you can't have this unless you pay for it." The point is, it's like fighting fires, you can't isolate it.
It's a complete dead-end and the sooner the industry realizes this the better.
This is why I use Microsoft Teams and Outlook as my password manager. I just save my passwords to draft or email them to my coworkers so they never lose track /s
the Achilles heel of a "secrets vault" is it becomes a defacto priority target. I still dont see how any reasonable person was convinced a cloud service was the best place to put all their secrets.
The problem is not the secrets vault. It's the casual acceptance of giving peoples data to third party processors. What value do last pass customers get from having their details passed on to a marketing firm? None. For all the talk of privacy and putting customers first they are acting like any other company in any other field.
Using a password manager has 2 main tradeoffs and mistakes:
1- Tradeoff individual account risk, for systemic risk. You may argue password managers are safe, but few would argue that the risk model reduces the risk of individual password leaks more than the risk of all your passwords leaking. It's a tradeoff.
2- Cat and mouse security: There's a class of security decisions that work because they are new and different. First the weakness was that passwords were short, then you make passwords long but unmemorable, so people rely on some other mechanisms to authenticate, like a file on their computer, a drive, a fingerprint, facial recog, which may in turn be protected by a second factor password.
At first the new security model will not be stressed, but as more users migrate from one security model to the next one, that's when you are able to compare the security of both technologies, it starts being a juicy enough target that it becomes attacked.
So we are at the point where password managers are used enough that they start becoming worthwhile targets of attack (to overcome the difficulty of vulnerating them).
Also worth noting that these attacks are more winner-takes-all. In the sense that rather than seeing one account hacked every couple of hours, you will see them all hacked at once, because you introduced a vendor in the password supply chain AND because the vendor centralizes all of the passwords. So target that one vendor and from a single attack you get all the spoils. So when comparing the security of the olden method and the new, just 1 incident is enough to undo all of the reputational gains it has made over the years.
Password managers (whether it's Lastpass or your browser's built-in password store) also protect against phishing since they tie passwords to domain names.
I don't think password managers which store encrypted vaults are less safe than trying to have and juggle strong unique-per-domain passwords, even if you think that the password manager is becoming a target.
When they work… I finally gave up on 1Password as it has been getting worse and worse about actually autofilling for a few years. After all the Avengers turned into investors and the price increase was announced, I jumped ship. It felt like they were more worried about their ROI than the product. After 18 years of use, this was pretty disappointing.
For personal use, Bitwarden + a Raspberry PI should work perfectly fine. Your devices will sync when you are home. If they get out of sync, your fallback is to password reset. Or use your browser's built-in password manager which also syncs in most cases. I prefer to be browser-agnostic since it gives an easy solution to handle non-web passwords.
"Password manager" used to mean a program that runs locally on your computer. At some point people started making it into a SaaS, because that's more profitable.
I do think there are some cases where an online password manager makes sense, e.g. for businesses, but for individuals it's better to just stick with an offline password manager, at least for the high value accounts.
You can and should have the best of both worlds. Using Enpass, the program _is_ local, it just backs up the entire database (encrypted SQLite3) to a cloud.
But if even that is too much then f.ex. `keepass` + a scheduled script to periodically backup to your own servers is also perfectly viable.
>At some point people started making it into a SaaS, because
Wait. That's a thing? Like, there are drooling, mouth-breathing stooges out there that would trust not just one of their passwords to such a thing, but all their passwords to it?
It's not just about long vs. short passwords. IMO the greatest benefit of having a password manager -- whether it's a bloated Electron app or just a text file on your computer -- is that it enables you to juggle hundreds of different passwords, randomly generated for each site. It's the best way we know of to limit the blast radius when (not if!) some of those sites inevitably get hacked.
We need a bitcoin hardware wallet kind of password manager, where the actual passwords are stored on a hardware security key. When you click on the computer on the password you want to use, the hardware security key shows it's name on it's screen, and asks you to press a button on it to confirm that you want to use it.
For backup, the hardware security key let's you download a file from it with all of your passwords encrypted, and the decryption password it's shown on it's screen (something like 12 random words)
> The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
How does anyone seriously trust LastPass anymore? Years ago, I was working for a company handling bank data. They were using LP immediately following a previous LP security incident and had no plans to migrate away.
A lot of people and orgs don't use security products for security. They use them for security theater. A vast majority of people, even many security people, will never hear about this breach. So LastPass still works great for them.
I think a lot of people use products like LastPass because it makes storing passwords easier. Works on mobile, computer, tablet. Pretty good experience tbh.
With something like LastPass it's also much easier to create unique strong passwords for other sites.
Also, let's be real:
> The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
I'm pretty sure 99% of the people on exposed have already had their names, phone numbers, email and physical addresses leaked already. This has nothing to do with the security of your passwords stored in LP. They have some CRM, some person from their 800 employees clicked a sketchy link and it leaked that. It's not good, but its hardly an indictment of their product or usefulness
> I think a lot of people use products like LastPass because it makes storing passwords easier. Works on mobile, computer, tablet. Pretty good experience tbh.
> With something like LastPass it's also much easier to create unique strong passwords for other sites.
Sure, but LastPass, in addition to being the least secure option, doesn't even have a good user interface, and it's expensive. There are dozens of other password managers out there, each one better than LastPass in every way.
Doing the research takes time and energy.
Switching takes time and energy.
Changing all your passwords after you switch so they aren't potentially exposed in the next LastPass break takes time and energy.
People have a lot of things going on and have to make a decision about whether the risk justifies the effort.
Then there's feature gaps. LastPass is available on all platforms, has convenient sharing, a good story for emergency recovery if I'm incapacitated and want family to get access to things, and support for 2FA options such as Yubikey. Most competitors lack at least some of those, which is an issue if you're relying on them.
Personally, I left Lastpass for 1Password several breaches ago, but it took me a couple weeks of research to decide where to move to, at least a week of changing passwords on sites afterwards, and however much time and energy it took me to help others who I share credentials with switch at the same time.
Security Best Practices change all the time. Failing to implement MFA because "it takes time and energy" and "besides we implemented 12 character, complex passwords years ago" will not be valid excuses for government regulators when they come knocking.
Password managers are entirely a UX problem waiting to be solved better. Every time I hit a UX bug with my password manager, I mutter that I could do fix that, and then know that mine would also be worse in so many ways just to reach parity. What I wish is there was a public bug tracker of UX issues/optimizations that I, and the rest of the world, could log ideas to. Password managers are such a good idea but they all need just that much more work to be seamless.
Can you give me an example of a UX problem that you attribute to the password manager? That'd help me understand.
I often hit problems with 1Password's autofill on particular websites, but by and large I blame the website. Few examples:
* one website expects me to type the PIN then a Symantec VIP OTP token into a single field called "password". That's a (possibly deliberately) password manager-hostile design. I finally got annoyed with it enough to use an open source project called `python-vipaccess` to create a proper `otpauth://totp/...` URL I could add into 1Password and wrote a TamperMonkey script that added separate autofillable fields that would get concatenated automatically. Now 1Password works fine.
* frequently websites will complain about needing a valid credit card number after autofill. I have to go to the field, delete the last digit, add it back, tab away, then it works. I think they have just used the wrong event handlers and never tested it with autofill.
* they often will skip `autocomplete="new-password"` attributes, so my password manager will look for a (nonexistent) current password rather than prompting me for a new one, and/or they won't have the username and new password fields ever in the DOM at the same time so the password manager doesn't save it properly. (Even if it makes sense in terms of user-visible flow to do these in sequence, they can still leave the username in as a hidden form element for the benefit of the password manager.)
I've also hit UX problems in 1Password itself, for example the "quick access" pop-up doesn't reliably appear on the current Space in macOS. (Confusing and annoying to have to switch to another to see it.) But they seem less common.
Thanks for the feedback. It's certainly a challenge to make 1Password work on every website that exists, and even more so to keep it working over time, especially with old items that people created years ago which no longer match the site. We do have a whole "filling and saving" team dedicated to the problem, and we do follow up when users report issues with sites.
I'd love to look into the Quick Access placement. It is supposed to appear on all spaces and sets an NSWindow property to do so. Is there anything particular that you think triggers it (multi-monitor, full screen apps, etc)?
> I'd love to look into the Quick Access placement. It is supposed to appear on all spaces and sets an NSWindow property to do so. Is there anything particular that you think triggers it (multi-monitor, full screen apps, etc)?
Thanks! I haven't seen it in a while, so maybe it's been fixed by either a 1Password or macOS update or is specific to a setting I since changed. But I'll keep my eyes out for if it happens again. I do have a multi-monitor setup.
I do see right now that if I'm on a full-screen app, 1Password's quick access window doesn't show up; if I move to the next space over I see it for a moment and then it disappears. In contrast, Spotlight search will actually pop up directly over my full-screen app, though knowing Apple they could be using some private API for this behavior.
These are tiny paper cuts that add up to pain, like the ones you mentioned that affect me/a tiny portion of the user base so they aren't worth fixing. Is the justification I'm sure that's being made. For example, if site auto detection that you're submitting a form fails that you laboriously have to add field elements in and if the editor is on a different workspace on mac you have to go to the application space/desktop than three finger swipe back to the browser space/desktop and then back to the application space/desktop and then back-and-forth to fill in four different security questions. Tiny stuff like that that really adds up, that make password manager usage go down.
> These are tiny paper cuts that add up to pain, like the ones you mentioned that affect me/a tiny portion of the user base so they aren't worth fixing. Is the justification I'm sure that's being made.
I think it's not only that but also that making site-specific changes (as I did with a TamperMonkey script) is fragile and could get them into trouble if their changes do the wrong thing (immediately for everyone, for some users, or after some site change). Might be better from their perspective to honor the site's stated intent even if that intent is questionable. In my top example, the "password" field actually is a password if the user hasn't enabled 2FA, so the changes I made wouldn't work for 1Password to apply to everyone. They could detect the label "PIN + Token" to gate it, but what if that text changes in a redesign or is sometimes localized into another language? and so on.
In the broadest sense, I agree there are big UX problems, but how much should we expect the password manager to do unilaterally? fwiw even when a bunch of players got together to make broader changes, we ended up with passkeys, which are far from perfect in many ways. (The flows about scanning a QR code from one device to another, without necessarily even knowing which device has a working passkey for that site... the simultaneous confusing offers of different ways of signing in... try talking your vision-impaired father through that over the phone.)
> if the editor is on a different workspace on mac you have to go to the application space/desktop than three finger swipe back to the browser space/desktop and then back to the application space/desktop and then back-and-forth to fill in four different security questions.
Yeah, that sounds similar to my own complaint about quick access opening on the wrong Space, just applied to the main window instead. And of course when you have to use the security questions something else has gone really wrong, like the main password having changed on the site without having changed in your password manager.
* One way I've seen this is when people have overlapped usage in two different password managers (1Password vs either Google Passwords or Apple Passwords). They have import and export (except for passkeys), but it'd be nice if they had an incremental version to help you get out of this mess if you weren't disciplined in switching over all at once.
* Another is that when you change the site's password even while using the password manager, the actual site change and recording it in the password manager's database is hardly transactional. You can click the password manager's update pop-up even if it failed, or not notice it even if it succeeded. Again not really sure how they would address this unilaterally.
> I just hit one. Creating a new document in 1Password, the name of the document isn't preselected, so I have to hit delete to name it. Lots of little tiny shit like that.
Yeah, that's 100% on them.
I can't expect them to serve every website on the Internet, but a button on 1Password that was in the context menu for the extension that was "report this site is not working 100% perfectly", and they had a team to come in and check up on the site and extract way to improve their software.
I remember another stupid annoyance. There was one site where passwords were limited to eight characters but the way they password manager entered the passwords. It passed more than the characters along as the password so the password would fail if it auto filled, but if I copy and pasted or typed it manually it would work because the JavaScript had a chance to truncate. The fact that this site was limited to eight character passwords all other conversation, but that was super annoying until I figured it out.
Anyway. I have a love/hate relationship with my password manager.
(I'm Mitch from 1Password.) I do appreciate reading about these kinds of paper cuts and always follow up on them when I see them. We are going to address the item title issue next week, so thank you for that one.
It's true that sometimes very small/simple issues that affect some portiion of people can go for a long time. I'd like to find a better way of identifying these and getting to them quicker than just crawling through HN posts. If you have any thoughts or at least issues you'd like us to look into, always open to hear more.
I just hit one. Creating a new document in 1Password, the name of the document isn't preselected, so I have to hit delete to name it. Lots of little tiny shit like that.
1Password checks all these boxes and hasn't yet had a data breach.
Their biggest security hole is probably somewhere in the operational pipeline between 1P browser client developers and the static file servers hosting them.
Unfortunately it's one of the most bug-ridden and unreliable pieces of software I've ever used. I encounter issues with it on a daily basis, but the burden of switching and a lack of superior options keeps me locked in.
I stopped paying them when they killed local valuts, and secondarily when then moved away from native apps. I drifted along on the old 7.x client for awhile with local values.
I've more or less switched to apple keychain/passwords at this point. I need a solution for linux, and have been thinking about some kind of simple 1-way sync issue that dumps stuff from keychain into some other tool for use on linux.
Curious if you have any gripes or concerns about using the Apple keychain/passwords setup. Aside from Apple devices, do you mostly also stick with Safari? Was it hard to transition things like TOTP or passkeys?
i mostly stick to firefox I do some management of moving some passwords back and forth (i'm not yet using the firefox extension for apple passwords because i just learned about it).. but because i use firefox on my phone as well.. nbd.
In terms of TOTP I just use googleauth and oathtool.
I've been pretty happy with Bit Warden on Linux, though I just use the Firefox extension and am not sure if there's a native app
It was a fantastic, fast, reliable piece of software until they sold out for VC funding and went the Electron rebuild route.
I was a paying customer for 15 years and migrated away with the last price increases due to "AI-powered functionalities" and the new features making the product worse on top of already being salty over when they stopped the one-time licenses in favor of subscription.
Used it for years and never encountered a single bug, and I'm quite a power user with hundreds of items stored in it, shared vaults, and access multiple times per day. It's one of the few softwares I happily pay for. Maybe it differs from platform to platform, otherwise I can't explain your comment.
Any example bugs that you've encountered in the last week?
Their flow for regaining access after somehow "disauthorised" laptop, she there's an installed but unused for months plugin is one of the most infuriating.
It won't ask me for my secret key, which I have an can provide immediately, no, it won't allow me to authenticate myself with the phone, because our enterprise vault logs off quickly, I must however do a some absurdly obscure dance because FY, that's why.
Ugh, the enterprise authentication is dumb
1P is open source now?
> I think a lot of people use products like LastPass because it makes storing passwords easier. Works on mobile, computer, tablet. Pretty good experience tbh.
Yeah but wanting a product like LastPass doesn't require that you use LastPass. There are many good alternatives.
What's the solution? Don't have a CRM and store stuff about customers under lock and key? Don't give access to the CRM to any employees? More security training about clicking shady links?
I don't get how you think some other competitor would be better suited against this threat. The right solution is to mitigate the damage. CRM has minimum available stuff, like names, addresses, etc. Don't keep stuff like payment information, passwords, etc in that place as that's the vulnerable system. It seems like that's what LP does and probably every other company in this space does.
Again, it's entirely reasonable to have an off the shelf CRM, pretty broad access to it. You try to prevent phishing email or phone scams (assuming this is what it was) but you have 800 employees, its bound to happen.
> What's the solution?
Use any of the other password managers that don't have the poor security history that LP do.
I think they're asking how LastPass is supposed to prevent this particular breach.
Brand damage and lost of trust from customers are consequences of security breaches. I'm not saying don't have a CRM, but I am saying don't complain when the customer data in your CRM leaks and customers complain. LastPass has had several such breaches over the years, and I think people are right to say that the company has a reputation of poor security hygiene.
By all means, have a CRM. But consider that it probably doesn't need to be as broadly accessible as you think it does, and consider that the people with access to it probably need to be held to a higher standard.
> I'm pretty sure 99% of the people on exposed have already had their
Right, but LastPass is a company that wants to make you believe that you can trust them with some of your most important assets.
--
Probably related to this:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/lastpass-conf...
“On June 12th, LastPass was made aware of an incident that occurred at Klue (klue.com), a third-party market intelligence platform utilized by our go-to-market teams, which integrates with our Salesforce and Gong systems,” LastPass says.
"We immediately launched an investigation and learned that, as part of this incident, an unauthorized actor was able to obtain OAuth tokens Klue held for many of its customers, including LastPass.”
“The threat actor then used these credentials to access LastPass customer data within our Salesforce environment.”
That's a npm supply chain attack style but next level for the Enterprise game: hack one and get access to everything of all of them since they are all unrestricted connected and with each other.
And then they force us to install cloudstrike, antiviruses and client side monitoring because "us are the security problem".
When their CRM and support systems are improperly secured, it doesn't bode well for the security of their vaults. When attackers infiltrate one system, it's easier to laterally move to other systems.
Also, their marketing systems are also a mess. I've unsubscribed from their marketing emails multiple times, but to date I'm still getting marketing emails from them even though I'm no longer a customer. Even contacting their support about this issue hasn't helped.
Assuming you are in EU you could report them to local DPA. Objection (i.e. unsubscribing. Original automatic subscription may or or may not have been legal) to direct marketing is pretty much absolute due to GDPR Article 21(2), I'm not aware of any "workaround" companies have successfully managed to argue.
In the US you can report it to FTC for CAN-SPAM violations, but don't hold your breath on any enforcement.
> I'm pretty sure 99% of the people on exposed have already had their names, phone numbers, email and physical addresses leaked already. This has nothing to do with the security of your passwords stored in LP. They have some CRM, some person from their 800 employees clicked a sketchy link and it leaked that. It's not good, but its hardly an indictment of their product or usefulness
Would you be okay will a public database of all people's names, emails, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact details? After all, most people's data have already been leaked somewhere. Credit reporting agencies have leaked more sensitive data. I, for one, still expect companies to keep my private data private. Especially companies who's started purpose is to keep my secrets secret. It's a bad look for them and if I trusted them this would make me lose my trust in them. But, they already lost my trust two or three (I lost count) breeches ago.
Of course it's not okay. But this is pissing in the ocean. This is throwing buckets of water on the Titanic.
The damage is already done. Your private information was already leaked long ago. You can't make a sunk boat more wet.
I agree the ship has sailed but I have no desire to make it easier for people to spam me or social engineer any of my accounts. If they want to send some crypto to some stangers on the internet to do it, I can't stop that, but I am not going to hand the info to them on a silver platter.
Where I’m from there actually were guides like this of the whole country, published once a year, I think even into the early 2000s. They stopped doing it for cost savings, but this type of information being public is considered fairly normal by many, as long as you have the ability to unsubscribe.
Only if we also add Social Security numbers, since it was supposed to be a unique Identitifier (like an email) and not a secret.
my ssn (usa) and my credit info (also usa) was already leaked in a data breach. i don't care about my encrypted blob in lastpass being leaked because it's computationally too expensive to crack it (assuming it's not a targeted attack with hostile nation-state level gpu capacity)
Yes, a public database like this would be acceptable. That way the info isn't paywalled behind some white pages site or similar. And then maybe I could even update my own info to be correct. Contact info is pretty much out there for most people already. Hell, I put it on my resume and send that out to many people and put it on public sites.
I am glad you want the world to know your phone number, but not everyone does.
Since we still use SMS as second factors (or primary, as some in this thread said they don't write down passwords but just use password reset links to login), it's not the best security hygiene
it is acceptable to you when you don't expect that someone will abuse this info. But someone will.
> I, for one, still expect companies to keep my private data private.
better expect companies to never know your private data
> I think a lot of people use products like LastPass because it makes storing passwords easier. Works on mobile, computer, tablet. Pretty good experience tbh.
What you are describing is a password manager. No one here is questioning why people would use a password manager. That's like asking why people would use a toothbrush. The question is why anyone would use LastPass as their password manager.
> Also, let's be real:
> > The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
> I'm pretty sure 99% of the people on exposed have already had their names, phone numbers, email and physical addresses leaked already.
I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but this comment strikes me as really baffling.
LastPass has a very long history of breaches, some of them very severe with a big fallout. It's at the point where the yearly LastPass breach has become a meme just like the yearly T-Mobile breach. It makes no sense whatsoever to look at this incidence without that context and to claim "it's not that bad, they only leaked xyz".
On another note, of course does a breach tell something about the security practices of a password manager company. You really want the developer of your password manager to have good security practices and any sign to the contrary is concerning even when it is not directly related to the core product. Of course security is not about absolutes and mistakes and incidents do happen – what counts is how, how is dealt with them and if they repeat. In the case of LastPass history, including this breach, shows that they have atrocious security and you do not want to let your credentials get any millimeter closer to them than you can possibly avoid.
> I'm pretty sure 99% of the people on exposed have already had their names, phone numbers, email and physical addresses leaked already.
Again, I'm sorry for being so direct, but this argument annoys me greatly: This argument – that others have done similar bad already and similar harm has already been done – is beyond stupid and needs to die. It's why slippery slopes are real. It's the reason why normalization of bad things happen. It's what people with bad intentions continuously use with great success to slowly make their bad deeds socially acceptable.
When my neighbor dumps his trash on the street that does not allow me to do the same and does not make it any better if I do. I will be just as much in the wrong as him. The only difference being – when I use that excuse – that I will also be a coward.
The wrongdoing of others is never an apology to do the same; and just because something bad is normal does not make it any better and it is especially not an argument for making it even worse.
This.
If you want to be a security vendor reseller, just make sure to sell to orgs that have a compliance requirement, either by law or similar.
Do you sell firewalls? sell them to banks or something. Anti-malware endpoints? Insurances too. SIEMs? payment gateways for their PCI DSS environments.
Price it just below what would be the fine for not complying, that way you maximize the invoice.
I stopped playing the security vendor reseller game because it got too boring this way to make money.
And it will continue until we can sue company being breached for criminal negligence. Should a single company executive be personally liable in these situations, the scale of the problem would be orders of magnitude less severe because they would spend the appropriate amount of effort to cover their damn ass.
This is it. These companies don't really care about their customer's data. Their SDLC is no more rigorous than any other SaaS product. They have junior people and (now) AI pushing code with a quick "LGTM" PR check just like everyone else.
The way to stop this is to have actual consequences for the decision makers here. You can build high-integrity software and some fields (avionics) have done it. But the organization needs to be built from the ground up to do it and nobody's going to do it if you can just get breached and offer a phony apology over and over again.
“Here’s a year of credit monitoring. Be grateful.”
It is inertia. Customers are sticky, they do not switch unless they have to. If you're an enterprise, you have to go through establishing a new vendor relationship, onboarding a new password vault with your IT team, communicate it across the org, migrate data from the old password vault to the new password vault, etc. There is a real cost in time and resources to do this, and so, many avoid it until they have no other choice.
Lastpass is owned by PE. Why? Because Francisco Partners and Elliott Management bought a cashflow that is sticky. Its why most software companies were acquired by PE prior to the Cambrian explosion of generative AI.
Moving to another solution involves some expense and operational risk (changing procedures, increased human error rates, locking yourself out). Even though the risk of staying with the existing solution goes from "unlikely" to "possible" (so maybe from yellow/amber to red), a lot of companies rationalize it as "but now the provider will be extra careful so the likelihood is actually lower".
Crowdstrike had a famous incident and is still probably #2 in the cybersecurity world. Sometimes assessing risk is a funny business.
I worked for a big company that switched from 1password to Keeper. The transition was smooth and I do not see why it shouldn’t be as long as IT knows what they are doing.
True, but how come such risks are addressable when adding AI or opening up to yet another API or when some savings are promised with a new product/product feature?
> when adding AI ... or when some savings are promised
Because savings are promised. And who could say no to AI? (/s)
There's always some risk mitigation possible but it's costly or inconvenient. Companies pretend the risk is lower so they can do whatever they wanted to do but now with less accountability. The risk matrix says so.
But sometimes the tradeoff is genuinely not worth it. The bottom line is that each company has to do it's own calculations and decide whether moving is overall a better choice. Which risk is higher, that your provider is breached again or that you have new operational issues with the new solution. Which costs more, a chance of another security issue, or the guaranteed expense of replacing the solution? You do the same math at home all the time. Your washing machine leaked once, do you replace everything or just patch the hole?
Well, these types of companies typically carry cyber incident insurance. If there was, say, a ransomware attack, the carrier is going to bring in a forensic team to investigate. If it is determined that there was negligence, like not patching a system, that will be used to deny a claim. This might be a little different from the lastpass situation in that it's an untrustworthy vendor, but there's still significant exposure.
If this bank were my client, I would make sure that the decision-makers were aware.
"We need to be able to answer an RFP that asks "do you have a comprehensive credential management system?"."
Just like a previous employer I had, on background checks. "We need to run one. We don't care what you did or didn't do, if you're doing good work for us. But some of our customers require that we have performed them."
At some companies, "approved security vendor" just means the breach comes with procurement paperwork.
Because procurement is hard. Changing vendors is a big undertaking for big companies. They are certainly not going to be switching vendors every time there is an incident
Also use them as a password manager like an advanced version of Excel that fills in the passwords for you. Security isn't part of it. I have the feeling LastPass agrees.
If the passwords are still not known, the "breach" is not a fail for the end user. If the master password to the vault is secure, and the only way to the vault is still only through the master password, it's still doing what the end user wants it to do. "Breach" is meaningless without qualifiers.
I’ve done a lot of security consulting work for hundreds of companies and one thing I noticed is that the companies that actually took security seriously were the ones that had been breached in the past. Until the execs and board see the dollar impact themself and not just read about it, the security program never gets the funds it needs.
I’m not saying I recommend LastPass for that reason, but I wouldn’t write them off for that reason.
But LastPass has been breached multiple times by now. I don't think they really care
There are lots of types of a “breach”. The first and second (the major ones) were likely related so more like one continuous incident. This one was a vendor breach that had access to their data so not a reflection of their security program as much as the first.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying you can’t tell from this incident.
If the execs and board of a password manager company need to experience a breach to take security seriously, I don't really know what to say.
Weirdly being a security company actually can have the opposite affect. A small portion of potential customers or investors assume the company is more secure because they are a security company after all (and should be); therefore, the customer's security review are less stringent so exec can get away with smaller internal security budgets. Of course good security companys with good leadership doesn't do that... but those aren't the big companies.
What happened to the old days of only getting one chance to f-up? Once chance and they should be gone permanently.
How does anyone trust ANY third party with all their passwords and encryption keys is beyond me.
Setting up KeePassXC is trivial.
it's "trivial" in the sense of "I can launch the app in 2 minutes," but "non-trivial" in the sense of "I have a working, synced password manager across my devices with good security practices."
>but "non-trivial" in the sense of "I have a working, synced password manager across my devices
Is that actually something the average person needs? Do they create new accounts ever day or week that they need to have on all device immediately? Merging DBs is like a 2 minute exercise at best.
I would argue the friction is a good thing. "Do I actually need to give yet another website information about myself for an account?" The answer is no more often than not.
Yes I know people don't care but those who don't are not using a password manager.
I am not sure what you are saying, really.
It is a tool that does one thing really well.
It is trivial to sync the password db. You can use whatever you prefer.
> "I have a working, synced password manager across my devices with good security practices."
Well, using Lastpass or any other third party to store your passwords was never good security practice.
KeePassXC might do what someone needs, and I really appreciate the work of its developers, but when advocating KeePassXC, I should also acknowledge that the "UX" is rough in parts:
1. It has lots of features and complexity, but doesn't always convey affordances for common use cases to the user.
2. Some of the UI design feels very incrementally developed (naturally), and the implementation a bit quirky in parts.
(For one of many examples, when I had to do something involving adding TOTP secrets, once I found where to add them, I had to be careful in which sequence I clicked things, or it would just discard the secret I already put in the right place. If I hadn't been watching carefully, I might not have noticed immediately that it did this, and not been able to restore the secret before it was lost.)
Of course, in an ideal world, one would like to do a great holistic rethinking of the UI design (while preserving the data model), but that's a ton of work.
When advocating it to a "technical" person (who is not scared of, say, a legacy IDE), I would say it might do everything they need. When advocating to an ordinary user, I would look at their use cases, and see what they are going to see, and how confusing or quirky that might be for them.
KeepassXC comes with its own share of risks (supply-chain attacks, zero-day vulnerability detections etc). No matter, which 3p software you are using, you are effectively gambling on the chance that none of those risks materialize. The only alternative is to personally audit the code - library by library, script by script and build it yourself. But even that carries risks: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
You're ignoring threat modelling.
If I keep a KeepassXC database on a set of devices, sync'd using syncthing, then for a large range of threats I'd need to be a target of interest.
This is in contrast to LastPass which is going to attract a ton of blackhat attention.
Yes, supply chain attacks are possible but they're equally possible for lastpass.
Switching to a self-hosted solution isn't perfect. Nothing is, and pointing that out isn't particularly useful.
What it does do is eliminate whole class of threats: large scale, broad based attacks against a single, high value target.
In fact I'd argue writing passwords down in a notebook or putting them in a naked text file on your computer is better than trusting a centralized service like LP.
Of course, if you are a target of interest, the calculus changes entirely.
Passbolt and Bitwarden can be self-hosted on top of offering the usuals pros like MFA, an API incl. integrations (e.g. https://external-secrets.io/latest/provider/passbolt/) and a better UX that does not involve syncing files between team members
I use KeepassXC, but I have no need to share passwords with other people. In a corporate situation that would probably not work as well.
KeePassXC is not for a "normal" user. It really needs to get default entry tempates [1] out the door.
[1] https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/8228
E2EE done properly is why. See 1Password security whitepaper for how.
This. KeePassXC plus Google Drive client is all you need.
People still use Windows
The one that amazes me is Okta.
OK their Mac UX is great, but given their rate of incidents how can you trust it?
Clearly this stuff is not actually bought based on track record.
Funny I used to work in an org with Okta.
Having your own auth workflow was instant fail with the well architected framework committee. Using Okta was instant pass.
I don't necessarily disagree with that policy but given that Okta was breached several times while I was working there, it was interesting the extent to which our CSO had blinders about it.
Liability is the answer! If you build an auth system and it fails, it's your backside. If Okta fails, it's theirs. Enterprises buy products as much as they buy protection from problems.
They don't offer any meaningful reimbursement if they lose your data so what does that matter ?
Some of its about sharing the pain.
e.g. when Crowdstrike takes down Windows across the worlds or AWS east coast falls over everybody hurts. At that point the story is easy, you point at the broken thing, mumble something about improving resilience, and everyone just moves on.
Roll your own system and have it taken down / breached specifically? There's noone to point at. It's hard to make the narrative anything except it being your fault.
You have (the perception of having) someone to forward the claim to once you're hit by one where the damages are quantified in money like a life insurance or disability payout caused by the data loss?
It's about shifting the blame, not compensation. You're paying for "not my problem," not "it always works and I get reimbursed when it doesn't."
As someone that is not really in the game, does Okta have such a bad track record, and are there alternatives that are considered solid? From the outside, it seemed like EntraID is a bit of a burning dumpster fire, while Okta seemed expensive, but usable and decent (from comments I read)
The current default for lazy enterprise customers seems to be an unholy tangle of Active Directory, Entra, and Okta. If you use all three it's 3x more secure, right?
Okta I get, Entra I sort of get. But AD is great.
What's the risk, and does that change by moving to an alternative?
Companies deal with leaked secrets a lot. A company already using a password manager is ahead of the game.
Suppose they move to a competitor. That's a migration and training that someone has to drive. What do they gain? Another company that can also have exploits? Or they self-host, and now have to fund that, and still potentially get exploits?
Ultimately, this likely isn't that big of a deal for a company.
And they have to weigh it up against all the other things that they can be doing.
Compare https://hn.algolia.com/?q=lastpass to basically any other password manager, like https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1password or https://hn.algolia.com/?q=bitwarden
Those companies do not have the same number and severity of security incidents. lastpass is truly in a category of its own
i'd love to switch from my lastpass family plan to... something else.
but there is a non-trivial switching cost to migrate several people (with varying technical aptitudes) that each use several platforms.
if 1password had a one-click migration flow they'd be able to win over a lot of converts.
File > Import > LastPass. Log into LastPass. Now you have your LastPass details in 1Password.
https://support.1password.com/import-lastpass/?mac
You pretty much export your data from lastpass and import it into 1password. The only thing it doesn't do is have 1password log into your lastpass account and pull it out itself.
At least in the past the default import-export route did not move attachments, be careful!
As others have pointed out, LastPass is often chose for compliance. Not for security.
I think most people use password managers for convenience, not security.
I remember ten years ago telling our so-called leaders that the data will get leaked from LastPass. They were all gung-ho about it being secure blah de blah. Luckily most of us don't work there anymore.
If you think I'm going to try and get my mom onto a different password manager, after it took literally ten years to migrate her away from the printed list in her purse...
A printed list in her purse has certain beneficial properties that a password manager does not.
Similarly, it has certain deficits that a password manager does not.
> They were using LP immediately following a previous LP security incident
“Yeah, but they fixed that!”
Normies don’t pull the historical list of breaches and vulns.
They just read headlines.
I had one of their salesmen harassing me back in 2018 or 2019 when one of their many breeches hit. I said "this is why."
Enterprise IT is all about outsourcing enterprise IT
nobody cares, there’s like 2 people whose job it is to care, one works for your company and one works for the third party IT company - and maybe your company’s General Counsel but even they just care that your CTO said they care
everyone else just has whatever enteprise service was presented to them
[dead]
Lots more companies affected. Some more listed below:
>"Klue has not said how many of its hundreds of customers are affected. Several companies have come forward to confirm they had data stolen during the attack, including Gong, Jamf, HackerOne, Insurity, OneTrust, Recorded Future, Snyk, Sprout Social, and Tanium."
>Cybercrime group Icarus took credit for the breach, saying on its leak site that it will publish the stolen data on Monday if the company does not pay the hackers’ ransom."
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/22/klue-hack-results-in-data-...
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https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/klue-supply-chain-incident-a...
> The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
WTF is LastPasd doing, handing customer details to a market research company? Any such data should have been fully anonymized: no names, no specific addresses, etc..
For anyone looking for a recommendation: I use KeepassXC with Keepass2Android. Open source, with a local database that you can choose to sync (or not). I sync using Own cloud.
I self host everything but email and credentials. Email because I already have a full time job, and credentials because if an emergency is sufficient enough to remove me from my hardware, that’s when I’ll need my passwords the most.
To be fair, I could just sync the db somewhere safe.
> Any such data should have been fully anonymized: no names, no specific addresses, etc..
Why even give them that?
I've been using pwsafe for years. Also free and open source. Local-only vault. No cloud service to depend on that's going to incompetently lose your data. You can optionally store your vault in dropbox or iCloud drive, but why would you?
passwordstore.org also a nice alternative
This is what I've been using for a long time now. It's probably too technical for most people, especially if you're talking about syncing across multiple devices, but that's not a problem for me.
As much as the collective dumping on LastPass for yet another breach, and how they're totally irresponsible for handing customer data to some third party is amusing.
I think if people took a moment to actually look at what happened, they might realise that the story everyone has in their heads is quite different from reality.
Klue is one of those CRM services that so many sales teams are using. Yes, you have to hand them customer records (email of the customer contacts, finance teams, etc). That show Klue delivers it's "market intelligence" thing about that customer.
If you go to your sales teams and see what random stuff they have hooked up to your systems, I bet you will find similar things.
Whether or not this is a good idea (I firmly dislike it), this is how sales teams work these days. If you try to take it away you will be fighting the entire sales organisation.
I am more surprised that these breaches don't happen more often.
It doesn't impact LastPass's actual password databases.
(No affiliation with any of the entities involved in this)
> I am more surprised that these breaches don't happen more often.
They do.
they do.
how often you notify the public is a completely different discussion.
I'm sure this is worse than using lastpass in some way
but for the past couple years I've just generated and forgotten 90% of my passwords. the final 10% I keep in a password manager. But if the service isn't really that important I just use the 'forgot my password' to change and generate a new password every time I need to login
This works if the account doesn't have 2FA. On my last side project app users can login only via email OTP. There are security downsides with that, someone can send phishing link and use OTP submitted to the fake site, but the app doesn't store anything sensitive (it's a game which tracks your progress) so I guess it's not a major security risk.
I got caught out as I had no longer access to the old phone number that was now used to send 2FA text.
oh dang that's not good. I've had the same phone number since 2006 so I didn't really think about it
But the phone number you have is not 100% in your control. I had AT&T flub something and I lost my number and they assigned me a new one (I was chanting my plan just after they did some merging with someone). Granted its unlikely but I would still use defense in depth and not have password reset be my only login method.
Thats totally fair and really scary since so many services think 2fa means texting or calling a phone number (my bank for example)
This is why a lot of services have just moved to using email with magic links to log people in.
In the end for a lot of services controlling your email is defacto controlling the login.
I am a vocal opponent to magic links via email (I am an unhinged person, in case it wasn't obvious before :) ).
I NEVER log into my mail from my laptop/desktop. I access my email via my phone's mail app.
So
1. try logging on via my laptop's browser
2. service sends a magic link to my email
3. click the link on my phone
4. now I'm logged in on my phone! not what I wanted!
Manually forward the magic mail to an address which you can use on your laptop/desktop for that purpose only.
Even though i understand your consideration of separating regular access and reset onto different devices, im am still more sceptical about smartphone security than anything else. What happens when someone gets access to your phone? They could redirect and use the magic mails too.
Links sent in plaintext over the network. :(
Potentially, but if you have your password reset process be sending a reset code by email it's effectively the same account access.
I've been an Enpass user for years because I got a lifetime purchase for a good deal. They don't host the cloud services for syncing passwords. Instead you just auth your cloud storage (I use Google Drive) and it syncs to that.
This approach seems better to me. For one thing, I'd already be screwed if someone malicious got into my Google account, probably worse than if they got into my password manager. And additionally, this means they're not creating an absolute jackpot of data to breach in a centralized place. No one's gonna hack Enpass of all their passwords because that would require hacking all of Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, etc. and looking for the files manually.
> No one's gonna hack Enpass of all their passwords because that would require hacking all of Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, etc. and looking for the files manually.
Or they compromise their self-update system if that exists.
How is that different from KeyPass for example?
As another happy Enpass user I don't think it is significantly different. The exception being that the KeePass frontends are really just as expensive as Enpass is now.
I also got a good deal on the lifetime pro membership before they moved to more of an annual model, which factors into my decision.
Which Keepass frontend do you use (if you use one on mobile)? Keepassium and Strongbox seem to be the ones that people talk about, but they are pricey too. I don't know anything about AuthPass, but I'm reluctant to use a free product; I'd rather use an inexpensive one, just to hopefully thwart supply chain attacks on that front.
I think it's time for LastPass to rebrand themselves as First0wned.
any company that stuck around (or began using) lastpass after vaults were leaked probably does not care about this one at all, considering its just CRM data.
i can sympathize a little bit with companies that stick with lastpass. when i had to switch an org from lastpass to 1password, it was a massive undertaking and incredibly annoying. however, i have no sympathy for anyone who has chosen lastpass after 2022.
Agreed.
The non-story here is the data is of minor criticality.
The real story is is that however minor, you expect LastPass to be better. They’re a password storage company, in order to be trusted they need to be better than this.
This isn't great but it's not that big of a deal either. A lot of companies got bit by the Klue breach but it's not like your vaults are being accessed.
The vaults were accessed years ago
The encrypted vaults, yes. Ideally they are worthless when the master password is sufficiently complex
iirc back then the vault wasn't encrypted as one blob, the domain name's belonging to each vault were revealed
Yes, in a separate breach.
>The vaults were accessed years ago
> Yes, in a separate breech.
Not nearly that cut and dry.
Many, not all encrypted vaults leaked out. If you lost data it was because you used a weak master password for that vault.
My point is the same - nothing about this breach implies vault access, it explicitly is related to the Klue breach, which contains some customer PII.
> If you lost data it was because you used a weak master password for that vault.
Even this is more complex (horrible pbkdf2 defaults, you're welcome for getting lastpass to increase them btw that was me) but it isn't relevant, no vaults are accessed in this breach.
I ditched LastPass long ago for BitWarden, though I mostly use the Passwords app from Apple now.
I switched to keepass a decade ago (maybe) and never looked back
Any detailed info on why Klue had this data, apart from being their partner? How does it serve LastPass customers to give that data to Klue?
Alternate revenue source to keep them in business as they probably hemorrhage customers due to being maybe the least secure password manager ever? I have to wonder how they have any customers left at all at this point
No, Klue is a competitive intelligence tool for sellers. You use it to keep track of "battle cards" (i.e. if they are selling a deal vs. 1Password, sales rep would go into Klue to see what the advantages of LastPass are vs that specific competitor).
It's a purpose specific knowledge base, not a data broker or any sort. But it will surely have information of who you sold to or tried to sell to because of it.
Managing enterprise sales/ leads.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657784
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48647272
Third time's the charm
>“On June 12th, LastPass was made aware of an incident that occurred at Klue (klue.com), a third-party market intelligence platform utilized by our go-to-market teams, which integrates with our Salesforce and Gong systems,”
The specific dependency that gets companies infected, and the optics that result, are so important. There have been sillier examples, but you can see how in this case, the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their main and only product.
“ the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their main and only product”
What do you mean exactly here What do you think LastPass could have done to prevent this specific issue?
Bitwarden doesn't redirect you to a third party if you visit their support page:
https://bitwarden.com/help/
But LastPass does (Salesforce CNAME):
https://support.lastpass.com/s/?language=en_US
So this couldn't have happened to bitwarden, you own the reputation loss if any of your suppliers get owned. Though it really doesn't matter anymore for LastPass they leaked their customers vaults before, I have no idea how they can still be in business.
Did they need to give them all of this?
customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, support case data, sales-related data.
Generally yes, if you want to use a Customer Relationship Management system like Salesforce. Customer names, contact information, and info about what they bought from you is table stakes data for CRM is it not?
If you are selling B2B or high ticket items, sure. But these are customers of a security product. It's as silly as running the names of mcdonalds customers through an AI to find hidden sales insights
Not installing the infected package of course.
It's worth noting that this is not 'their marketing provider' what they do is load 30 different providers for some reason, to maximize the reach of their data sharing and advertising network. Well, their network reached too far and touched an infected node.
You have no idea what Klue is
Not supply the information to any other company.
> the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their […] product
To be fair, and I don’t want to, supposedly the only thing that was compromised was contact info. No vaults were exfiltrated or unlocked (as far as the article info goes).
So this is really just another very boring info breach, not a targeted password-stealing hack.
The other breaches they suffered were worse.
Did lastpass also pull the dumbass 'no local vaults' move that 1password made? One of the nice things about a 'bring your own vault syncing' is that breaches like this don't have to mean a goddamned thing to you.
Not for this data, but in the past, yes - there is persistent pressure to do that for any maker of password managers, be it independent, in-browser or in-OS. (Source: I was a cofounder of a company that made a password manager as part of our product).
Sitting here with my KeepassX and being happy, again.
For folks new to the KeePass ecosystem, it’s KeePassXC[0] now. The original KeePass is still developed as well, however KeePassXC is a cross-platform updated version.
[0] https://keepassxc.org/
I recently tried KeePassXC. It is very good overall. I am not moving to it however because:
1. I have a side screen that is merely 360 pixels in height. KeePassXC does not work fine on it. KeePass2 does.
2. KeePass2 remembers the names of custom fields added and allows picking from those for a new entry. KeePassXC does not.
does the UI have a compact mode?
https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide#_compact_mode
How good is their mobile and sync story?
Syncing isn't a KeePassXC problem. The database is just a file. That may or may not make your life easier.
There are a few decent Android and iOS apps that work well. I use Nextcloud and WebDAV for access.
Not a setup I can recommend to just anybody though.
One of the security advantages of KeePass being just a file is that you can sync it in the way that makes sense to you.
The need to have an opinion on how you’d like to sync a file does, as you suggest, eliminate some portion of the population who need a fully baked answer in one step.
I used to use Google Drive, but now I use Syncthing, further reducing my exposure. Paired with Synctrain and KeePassium on iOS.
One tip: enable the atomic save option in settings to reduce the risk of weird cloud sync issues.
And if you use an untrusted sync like Google Drive, you can enable a keyfile and never let that file lane on Google Drive.
What would happen if the file was edited concurrently? Would any data be lost?
If you try to write to a file that has been changed, it'll ask to merge them. Not sure what the behavior is if two try to edit the same entry.
The mobile app is quite good, it works and gets out of your way. I use it on Android.
For syncing, I do it manually with rsync. Given the database is 1 file it's easy to move around. You can rsync / scp it over, use a USB cable, use cloud storage, etc..
I use a password manager in a "read many, write infrequently" way so I don't mind occasionally syncing it as needed.
I use keepassxc. I don’t sync mobile. My mobile device has an only the minimum subset of passwords I need saved on it.
These threads are always filled with keepass people who will tell you how great it is and not mention that you’re on your fucking own for you know Miner things like syncing or mobile use.
I’m sure it works for many people to Dropbox their vault around anytime they want to access something and manually handle copies and sync. I’m not nearly so naive as to think that has any degree of success outside tech bubbled people.
I have yet to meet a KeePass user under the illusion that the syncing story is a good fit for everyone.
But we are prioritizing “can’t” over “won’t” in terms of provider access to our credentials. That’s why these hack-related threads tend to draw folks who will remind you that other tradeoffs exist.
For a technical audience like HN, “can work out how to sync a file” is a decent assumption to make.
Source: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/klue-supply-chain-incident-a...
Why anyone would even consider using an online password manager is beyond me. Keepass works perfectly offline, and it's easy to sync. Just copy one file. I set up syncthing on my pc and phone and I basically just forget about it. For other places I have a particular subdomain (guid) where I serve the current copy of the file, gated by a password. The database itself is protected by both a password and a yubikey.
I, like many others, wanted to move off of LP but was too lazy. So I just exported my passwords and put them into Google Sheets. While I have rotated many of those passwords (especially the important ones) and put them into a better password manager, there are several I haven't — and they've remained safer in Google Sheets than in LP.
The lesson here is to get off of LP ASAP, you can figure out where to go later.
You put your passwords in Google Sheets? The data there is not encrypted at rest. Google has 191k employees in countries like China, India, and Pakistan who could potentially access your records. Make sure you use something that encrypts your data at rest, preferably on a device you own and control.
I put my passwords in Google Sheets temporarily. Then I moved them to 1Password, except the throwaway stuff.
Google accounts aren’t immune to being compromised, so I agree that it’s not a good home for passwords (without even the need to invoke internal threats) — but it felt safer than LastPass. Which ought to be an embarrassment.
your passwords are used to train LLMs now :3
Why those countries? Does google have weaker internal security for employees in those countries?
I had exactly this happen to me, suffered great monetary losses and had my identity stolen. I've learnt my lesson and have moved on to 1password.
At the end of it I couldn't help but reflect on my foolishness. I realised just how much better I would've felt if only it had been an American, Canadian, or European Googler who stole my data. It really is the worst when malicious entities are Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani. Just the worst!!! (/s)
this is... such a bad idea lol
Not as bad as the idea of passwords.
>an incident that occurred at Klue (klue.com), a third-party market intelligence platform
Well, I hope Klue got them more customers than they are losing due to this.
They still have no klue.
I'm so glad we migrated away from LastPass (to BitWarden). It was a breach that caused us to move in the first instance.
How is the experience with BitWarden clients so far? Their chrome extension bugs out for me for the most basic tasks.
I was just making the change from LP to BW yesterday, completely by coincidence. My first reaction is that the out-of-box experience is poor.
The first step was easy. The account creation and import of legacy data all went pretty well. But after that it wasn't so pretty.
The first hurdle was trying to understand their model for sharing data (so my wife and I can share important credentials). The model that LastPass uses is pretty intuitive to me: it's just a matter of sharing a folder, so relatively transparent. But Bitwarden has a whole separate concept of "organization", and the items being managed don't go in "folders" here, but in "collections". So there are two separate, and subtly different, models in play, and this is confusing. The good news is that the client aggregates the data so when you're using it day-to-day to fill login forms, you don't have to worry about the differences.
Once I'd gotten the data in place, I had to get the clients set up on the various platforms (browser extensions; desktop native, which is actually required for the browser extension's security to work right; phone). The OoB settings were entirely paranoid, and had me re-entering the complex master password over and over, really annoying me. Figuring out how to get to a reasonable balance required figuring out some settings whose labels are misleading. For example, "Unlock with PIN" sounded to me like it was going to add an extra layer of security, but it turns out that it really means "allow unlock using PIN in lieu of master password".
Also, note that while most of the settings default to paranoia-level (like the "require master password every time I inhale", that I mentioned above), you will probably want to change the default crypto cypher. It defaults to PBKDF2, but a better modern approach is the other choice, Argon2id.
...which also reminds me that there's a distinct lack of parity between client platforms. Although you need the desktop native app to manage browser extension security, there's a bunch it can't do. For example, after importing my legacy data, I needed to select all the contents of my LP shared folders and move them to the BW organization collection, but the native app (which seems to be an Electron app, btw) doesn't have a multi-select feature; you need to do that in the online web app.
I can see how any password manager can be safe. Especially from supply chain attacks. I use password safe on android, it writes an encrypted file locally. I'd really like to be able to flat seal the app to prevent network access. But I don't think android has such a feature.
Quite happy I moved away from LastPass long time ago. There are many options out there you can use.
Anyone still using lastpass in 2026 deserves this, I'm sorry but this company has proven time and time again they should not be trusted. I migrated off them years ago after one of these breaches and haven't looked back since.
Theres enough information here for enterprising people to commit blackmail.
The companies responsible for these lapses of security should be paying, starting first with investors, then the C-suite. That'll put a stop to this negligence VERY quickly.
Why not just use a browser based password manager? Just works. You need only one tool that gets updated. And Browser vendors are extremely vigilant about security. All platforms covered.
This has become all too common with lastpass. I migrated out during their last incident. I wonder how does it keep happening and how do customers still continue.
I'll never understand why someone would store their password on someone else's computer...
This looks like a customer data leak and not a vault leak? Still an issue but not a reason to go rotate every password - or am I misreading?
Just use pass...
https://www.passwordstore.org/
I ditched them after the last incident. So glad I don’t have to go through that again.
Unpopular take:
I "just" use google chrome password manager for "everything".. yes im sure it horrifies some HN ppl but my thinking is, from all the password managers out there, does anyone one spend more on security or hire better security ppl or have access to better security tools and infra than google (yes yes im sure outliers and some counter examples exists).
I routinely die a little inside when i see my gf (none techie) try and remember which one of her fav 3-5 often used passwords she has used for site/service abc as she tries to login.
Kinda tongue in cheek, I always tell her if you can remember your password it's a bad one !
LastPass is still behind TMobile on breach frequency, but maybe they will catch up soon.
I'm so glad I left LastPass a long time ago. There are better alternatives.
Note #1428 to self: Delete all data from LastPass already.
Deleting won't do anything if the data has already been leaked, just change your passwords and don't put them in LP.
Migrate to anything else, at this point you could setup your own Bitwarden server.
1password or Bitwarden is great alternative
I find it hard to believe that LastPass still has users.
Time to give up and move on.
oh well, time to remind users of keepass
whoever (willingly) still uses LastPass…
Lol. Again.
Private company third party password managers are bad. Across the board. They're a bad idea.
Deeply localized actual best practices can help solve this. Private companies can also help, but only if it isn't in the form of "you can't have this unless you pay for it." The point is, it's like fighting fires, you can't isolate it.
It's a complete dead-end and the sooner the industry realizes this the better.
Once more onto the breach…
[flagged]
This is why I use Microsoft Teams and Outlook as my password manager. I just save my passwords to draft or email them to my coworkers so they never lose track /s
Hello coworker of mine.
So... you business plan is to secure peoples personal data by handing some of that data to a third party. Got it.
the Achilles heel of a "secrets vault" is it becomes a defacto priority target. I still dont see how any reasonable person was convinced a cloud service was the best place to put all their secrets.
The problem is not the secrets vault. It's the casual acceptance of giving peoples data to third party processors. What value do last pass customers get from having their details passed on to a marketing firm? None. For all the talk of privacy and putting customers first they are acting like any other company in any other field.
Gmail is at least as large a target, and they don’t keep having breaches.
Using a password manager has 2 main tradeoffs and mistakes:
1- Tradeoff individual account risk, for systemic risk. You may argue password managers are safe, but few would argue that the risk model reduces the risk of individual password leaks more than the risk of all your passwords leaking. It's a tradeoff.
2- Cat and mouse security: There's a class of security decisions that work because they are new and different. First the weakness was that passwords were short, then you make passwords long but unmemorable, so people rely on some other mechanisms to authenticate, like a file on their computer, a drive, a fingerprint, facial recog, which may in turn be protected by a second factor password.
At first the new security model will not be stressed, but as more users migrate from one security model to the next one, that's when you are able to compare the security of both technologies, it starts being a juicy enough target that it becomes attacked.
So we are at the point where password managers are used enough that they start becoming worthwhile targets of attack (to overcome the difficulty of vulnerating them).
Also worth noting that these attacks are more winner-takes-all. In the sense that rather than seeing one account hacked every couple of hours, you will see them all hacked at once, because you introduced a vendor in the password supply chain AND because the vendor centralizes all of the passwords. So target that one vendor and from a single attack you get all the spoils. So when comparing the security of the olden method and the new, just 1 incident is enough to undo all of the reputational gains it has made over the years.
Password managers (whether it's Lastpass or your browser's built-in password store) also protect against phishing since they tie passwords to domain names.
I don't think password managers which store encrypted vaults are less safe than trying to have and juggle strong unique-per-domain passwords, even if you think that the password manager is becoming a target.
When they work… I finally gave up on 1Password as it has been getting worse and worse about actually autofilling for a few years. After all the Avengers turned into investors and the price increase was announced, I jumped ship. It felt like they were more worried about their ROI than the product. After 18 years of use, this was pretty disappointing.
For personal use, Bitwarden + a Raspberry PI should work perfectly fine. Your devices will sync when you are home. If they get out of sync, your fallback is to password reset. Or use your browser's built-in password manager which also syncs in most cases. I prefer to be browser-agnostic since it gives an easy solution to handle non-web passwords.
"Password manager" used to mean a program that runs locally on your computer. At some point people started making it into a SaaS, because that's more profitable.
I do think there are some cases where an online password manager makes sense, e.g. for businesses, but for individuals it's better to just stick with an offline password manager, at least for the high value accounts.
You can and should have the best of both worlds. Using Enpass, the program _is_ local, it just backs up the entire database (encrypted SQLite3) to a cloud.
But if even that is too much then f.ex. `keepass` + a scheduled script to periodically backup to your own servers is also perfectly viable.
What if your drive crashes and you lose all your passwords? How do I reach my passwords from multiple devices and keep them synchronized securely?
Sure you can self-host all of it also, but people like to pay for not having to do that.
>At some point people started making it into a SaaS, because
Wait. That's a thing? Like, there are drooling, mouth-breathing stooges out there that would trust not just one of their passwords to such a thing, but all their passwords to it?
heavy mouth-breathing
Are you sarcastic, or do you not realize your vault is encrypted with your master password and never readable to the service?
It became SaaS because its more practical when you have many devices or many users.
The article is about a marketing data breach, not passwords.
From a marketing perspective, a data breach of any kind looks horrible for a company whose entire job is keeping secrets safe.
I understand, just making a general comment.
And it's not unheard of that infections metastize, whether into developer accounts, product code... Probabilistically, this was a shot on goal.
I apologize for the mixed metaphors.
It's not just about long vs. short passwords. IMO the greatest benefit of having a password manager -- whether it's a bloated Electron app or just a text file on your computer -- is that it enables you to juggle hundreds of different passwords, randomly generated for each site. It's the best way we know of to limit the blast radius when (not if!) some of those sites inevitably get hacked.
We need a bitcoin hardware wallet kind of password manager, where the actual passwords are stored on a hardware security key. When you click on the computer on the password you want to use, the hardware security key shows it's name on it's screen, and asks you to press a button on it to confirm that you want to use it.
For backup, the hardware security key let's you download a file from it with all of your passwords encrypted, and the decryption password it's shown on it's screen (something like 12 random words)
> The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.