The number of FB comments must be multiple orders of magnitude larger than SO comments; the average user's education and comment quality much lower, so easier said than done.
The core of the problem, a lot of paragraphs down:
> we have strong evidence that supports our hypothesis that the adversary gained access to our [DNS provider's] credentials through the compromise of a third party provider
> A factor which possibly helped the attacker was that the password had not been changed since 2013
> We chose our DNS provider 18 years ago when 2FA was neither a consideration nor a possibility
> but 2FA was both possible and a consideration 18 years ago
You could setup your own dns servers obviously 18 years ago and in fact when starting out in the mid 90's that is exactly what we and many others did. (Criket Liu nutshell books from O'Reilly)
To clarify, the problem here wasn't with their DNS servers, but rather the registrar being compromised. You could run your own DNS servers and still get compromised like this unless you also happen to run your own registrar.
First time I used a 2FA device was an RSA "Safeword Card" which looked like a small handheld calculator and would display a multi-digit code that changed every minute or so. This was in 1998 and it had been put into use before that.
I think Sun Micro had deployed those to all their engs, perh others too. I think it had a PIN which when entered displayed the code which was valid for a min.
I meant SecurID were fairly well established by the early 2000s for VPN access, from what I remember, so I assume they came around at least a few years earlier, which would be the late 90s, they also weren't the only option on the market.
To me the biggest question is whether or not TLS was in place. That should prevent the attacker from intercepting the actual data without the victim noticing.
No, it doesn't. As mentioned in the article, the attacker successfully requested a TLS certificate for the hostname, which was possible because he could pass a CA's domain validation.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think HPKP could have prevented this for returning customers, because Fox-IT would have been able to pin the key of their own certificate. Then the new certificate used by the attacker would have been rejected by the customer's browser.
Yes, it more highlights that the simple presence of a valid certificate does NOT guarantee that you are connecting to the service that you think you are.
EV certs would be harder to compromise, but likely not too difficult for a sophisticated attacker. And who really notices if a site that had an EV cert suddenly doesn't? I might for my bank, but likely would not for a software product website.
> Maximum 10-minute time window during which the attacker temporarily rerouted and intercepted Fox-IT email for the specific purpose of proving that they owned our domain in the process of fraudulently registering an SSL certificate for our ClientPortal.
Specifically Comodo reports that they sent their normal validation email to hostmaster@fox-it.com (which unknown to Comodo or Fox-IT at the time was being directed to the attackers). I've never used Comodo's implementation of 3.2.2.4.4 but typically there's an email with a code in it, telling you to go to a web page and paste the code in if you want to authorise the issuance of the requested certificate, or something along those lines.
The security of this validation method (3.2.2.4.4) depends upon
1. You control DNS for your domain including the MX records used to deliver email (this is where Fox-It came undone here)
2. You control the MX servers, or if you have a third party providing backup MX, you trust them not to abuse that
3. The Certificate Authority does a good job of getting accurate DNS records and connecting to the right IP address
4. All email addresses in your WHOIS records plus a handful of famous ones like hostmaster@ postmaster@ are delivered to people you trust in your organisation.
In my understanding, there is continuously a chance (when mining solo) that you mine a Bitcoin block. If that happens (unlikely with consumer hardware) you make a lot of money at once since you get a whole block.
Such vulnerabolities would usually only impact a portion of users; and I hope these affected people have more reliable ways to keep up-to-date with vulnerabilities than HN...
I agree with both your feedback. This is an experimental app. For me, learning the order of keys was the most difficult part when I started to learn typing. I wonder if people who are not familiar with touch typing (if anyone exists) may find it easier. Lets see. Thanks again btw.
Some mathematicians do have a definite over-fondness for handwaving away statements they can't be bothered to prove with the "it follows trivially that ...". It's all well and good when such a proof would be 20 minutes of basic algebra, but that's frequently not the case.
One of our lecturers at university was so renowned for this, everyone taking that module organised to write "the answer to this question is trivial, and is left as an exercise to the marker" for any question they couldn't figure out in the exam.
