Adobe was recently breached and 150,000,000 user accounts were stolen. Adobe was following the one of the worst practices of password storage — reversible encryption (rather than hashing with a salt using a good, slow algorithm like bcrypt). A very, very old throwaway password of mine was among those leaked.
XKCD has referred to this breach as The Greatest Crossword Puzzle in the History of the World!
![It was bound to happen eventually. This data theft will enable almost limitless [xkcd.com/792]-style password reuse attacks in the coming weeks. There's only one group that comes out of this looking smart: Everyone who pirated Photoshop.](http://i.imgur.com/mgVu9VR.png "It was bound to happen eventually. This data theft will enable almost limitless [xkcd.com/792]-style password reuse attacks in the coming weeks. There's only one group that comes out of this looking smart: Everyone who pirated Photoshop.")
With the help of LastPass’ Has Adobe Leaked My Password, let me illustrate why:
The following hints have been used by other people that share your password. This information could be used to determine your password as well.
- Life, Universe, Everything
- life?
- DA
- h2g2
- hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy
- yes
- meaningoflife
- theusual
- everything
- hitchhiker
- dolphins
- gta
- a4
- answer
- meaning?
- life
- the answer
- the question of life
- HGTTG
- meaning of life
- the usual
- life..
- life the universe and everything
- a2lae
- the ultimate
- Hitchhiker
- What’s the answer?
- hitchhikers?
- Life the Uni and Every
- life meaning and flower
- common
- douglas adams
- a?
- maiden
- lotr no #
- Adams question
- Hitchhiker’s Guide
- answer?
- question
- Life Meaning
- adams
- life universe everything
- HHGTTG
- the number
- towel
- typical
- The Usual
- How many roads must a man walk down?
- Life, the universe, and everything
- What is the meaning of life, the universe and all?
Would you care to guess what password the naive, young me used for Adobe?
Next steps
- Check whether Adobe lost your password
- Get LastPass browser extensions
- Once your passwords are in LastPass, use the LastPass Security Challenge to eliminate duplicates
Leave a Reply