this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Change your passwords: Attackers claim a 'catastrophic security breach' of the Internet Archive, with 31 million emails and hashed passwords captured [also Archive.org under DDoS] (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They will start a dictionary attack on the most common passwords and check their hashes against the stolen database. The speed depends on whether the password hashes obtained are salted in a known method (or not at all). If so, they can perform the dictionary search or brute force locally and VERY quickly.

Take these charts with a grain of salt, they always depend on the attacker's computing power. My password was generated with a password manager and it will take millenia to crack with a reasonable number of modern GPUs so I'll be able to change it in time.

If the method is not known, they will need to go through the servers, which have rate limits.

The passwords are probably hashed with usernames so they can only attack one person at once but of course, once they have the plaintext password, they can use it anywhere else the user reused it or a variation of it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

If the password hashes aren't salted they can be cracked with a rainbow table - every password up to (whatever length the rainbow tables go up to now - 10 chars?) is easily cracked in seconds

I expect Internet archive salts their password hashes.

It doesn't matter if the salting method is known, all salting methods are known and it's easy to see what salt a password is hashed with as you need to know so you can hash a received password the same way for validation