The 1 thing you need to know about the Daily Motion hack

It was just released that Daily Motion suffered a hack attack resulting in a large number of usernames and email addresses being released. Rather than focusing on the number of records received (the wow factor), I want to highlight what most places are just glancing over: Password Storage.

According to the report, only a small portion of the accounts had a password associated with it. That is in the millions, and you might be thinking this is bad. It is actually the highlight of the story. Why? Daily Motion used bcrypt to hash their user passwords before storing them.

Bcrypt uses both a salt value and a work factor when hashing the data. The salt has been a long time recommendation when hashing passwords as it can help reduce rainbow table attacks. The work factor, which has been recommended much more in recent years makes brute forcing passwords work intensive. This means that it requires more time per password, slowing down large cracking attacks.

Bcrypt is not the only option either. PBKDF and Scrypt are other available options that work in a similar way.

Using a strong algorithm makes it much more difficult to crack the passwords in the event that they are hacked some how. The use of any of these algorithms doesn’t rule out the possibility of cracking the passwords. They just make it much more difficult or time intensive. There are always circumstances that can change this. However, using one of these algorithms can go a long way in helping protect that data.

How are you storing passwords?

Take a moment to look at how you are storing passwords and consider how it will stand up in the event of breached account details. Do you use a unique salt for each password? Do you implement a work factor to slow cracking attempts down?

How would you handle this type of breach?

If accounts were to be breached like this, how would you handle it? Do you have a process in place? Would you force password resets? How would you notify users? Consider these types of questions to verify you have a plan in place.

James Jardine is the CEO and Principal Consultant at Jardine Software Inc. He has over 15 years of combined development and security experience. If you are interested in learning more about Jardine Software, you can reach him at james@jardinesoftware.com or @jardinesoftware on twitter.