Evernote hacked – all users have to change passwords

This is how the nightmare of having a bad press starts:

Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service. As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset.

More infos here.

evernote

The strange thing is that not all users received the notification per email.

If you wonder why you can’t login anymore to Evernote, this is the reason.

The only solution is to try to login on the website and click the link on top of the page (see marked with yellow):

evernote-home

 

 

Comparing the data breach with the ones at LinkedIn, Last.fm and others from last year, we can’t stop to wonder why Evernote didn’t learn from the mistakes of the others.

Simply hashing a password with salt is by far not enough anymore. Even passwords with salt can be rather easily reversed because we are only talking about MD5. Imagine that if the attackers have also accounts at Evernote, they know their passwords. This means, that now they have the plain text password and its computed hash with salt. With enough computation power it is not hard to get the plain text of all passwords. And, because many users re-use passwords for multiple sites, including for the email address itself, imagine the consequences of such a breach.

I strongly suggest that if you had an account at Evernote you change your password now and use a strong password that you don’t use anywhere else.

 

Sorin Mustaca

IT Security Expert

via Avira – TechBlog http://techblog.avira.com/2013/03/03/evernote-hacked-all-users-have-to-change-passwords/en/


© Copyright Sorin Mustaca, All rights Reserved. Written For: Sorin Mustaca on Cybersecurity


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About the Author

Sorin Mustaca
Sorin Mustaca, (ISC)2 CSSLP, CompTIA Security+ and Project+, is working since over 20 years in the IT Security industry and worked between 2003-2014 for Avira as Product Manager for the known products used by over 100 million users world-wide. Today he is CEO and owner of Endpoint Cybersecurity GmbH focusing on Cybersecurity, secure software development and security for IoT and Automotive. He is also running his personal blog Sorin Mustaca on Cybersecurity and is the author of the free eBook Improve your security .
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