The world’s most popular password manager has been hacked

For people who have numerous accounts across the Internet, password managers such as LastPass are an invaluable tool. The problem is, if someone manages to get a hold of your master password, they then have access to every password you have stored on the service. That’s why it was such a big deal yesterday when LastPass announced that it had been hacked, although the company has assured users that there’s no evidence that any accounts have been accessed. 

We want to notify our community that on Friday, our team discovered and blocked suspicious activity on our network. In our investigation, we have found no evidence that encrypted user vault data was taken, nor that LastPass user accounts were accessed. The investigation has shown, however, that LastPass account email addresses, password reminders, server per user salts, and authentication hashes were compromised. We are confident that our encryption measures are sufficient to protect the vast majority of users. LastPass strengthens the authentication hash with a random salt and 100,000 rounds of server-side PBKDF2-SHA256, in addition to the rounds performed client-side. This additional strengthening makes it difficult to attack the stolen hashes with any significant speed. Nonetheless, we are taking additional measures to ensure that your data remains secure. We are requiring that all users who are logging in from a new device or IP address first verify their account by email, unless you have multifactor authentication enabled. As an added precaution, we will also be prompting users to update their master password.