[ISN] eHarmony confirms its members' passwords were posted online, too

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2012 02:58:42 -0500 (CDT)
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/06/eharmony-confirms-member-passwords-compromise/

By Dan Goodin
ars technica
June 6 2012

Online dating site eHarmony has confirmed that a massive list of 
passwords posted online included those used by its members.

"After investigating reports of compromised passwords, we have found 
that a small fraction of our user base has been affected," company 
officials said in a blog post published Wednesday evening. The company 
didn't say what percentage of 1.5 million of the passwords, some 
appearing as MD5 cryptographic hashes and others converted into 
plaintext, belonged to its members. The confirmation followed a report 
first brought by Ars that a dump of eHarmony user data preceded a 
separate dump of LinkedIn passwords.

eHarmony's blog also omitted any discussion of how the passwords were 
leaked. That's unsettling, because it means there's no way to know if 
the lapse that exposed member passwords has been fixed. Instead, the 
post repeated mostly meaningless assurances about the website's use of 
"robust security measures, including password hashing and data 
encryption, to protect our members’ personal information." Oh, company 
engineers also protect users with "state-of-the-art firewalls, load 
balancers, SSL and other sophisticated security approaches."

The company recommended users choose passwords with eight or more 
characters that include upper- and lower-case letters, and that those 
passwords be changed regularly and not used across multiple sites. This 
post will be updated if eHarmony provides what we'd consider more useful 
information, including whether the cause of the breach has been 
identified and fixed and the last time the website had a security audit.

[...]


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Received on Thu Jun 07 2012 - 00:58:42 PDT

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