- cross-posted to:
- selfhosted@lemmy.world
- plex@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- selfhosted@lemmy.world
- plex@lemmy.ca
We have recently experienced a security incident that may potentially involve your Plex account information. We believe the actual impact of this incident is limited; however, action is required from you to ensure your account remains secure.
What happened
An unauthorized third party accessed a limited subset of customer data from one of our databases. While we quickly contained the incident, information that was accessed included emails, usernames, securely hashed passwords and authentication data.
Any account passwords that may have been accessed were securely hashed, in accordance with best practices, meaning they cannot be read by a third party. Out of an abundance of caution, we recommend you take some additional steps to secure your account (see details below). Rest assured that we do not store credit card data on our servers, so this information was not compromised in this incident.
What we’re doing
We’ve already addressed the method that this third party used to gain access to the system, and we’re undergoing additional reviews to ensure that the security of all of our systems is further strengthened to prevent future attacks.
What you must do
If you use a password to sign into Plex: We kindly request that you reset your Plex account password immediately by visiting https://plex.tv/reset. When doing so, there’s a checkbox to “Sign out connected devices after password change,” which we recommend you enable. This will sign you out of all your devices (including any Plex Media Server you own) for your security, and you will then need to sign back in with your new password.
If you use SSO to sign into Plex: We kindly request that you log out of all active sessions by visiting https://plex.tv/security and clicking the button that says ”Sign out of all devices”. This will sign you out of all your devices (including any Plex Media Server you own) for your security, and you will then need to sign back in as normal.
Additional Security Measures You Can Take
We remind you that no one at Plex will ever reach out to you over email to ask for a password or credit card number for payments. For further account protection, we also recommend enabling two-factor authentication on your Plex account if you haven’t already done so.
Lastly, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this situation may cause you. We take pride in our security systems, which helped us quickly detect this incident, and we want to assure you that we are working swiftly to prevent potential future incidents from occurring.
For step-by-step instructions on how to reset your password, visit:https://support.plex.tv/articles/account-requires-password-reset
I hate the tone companies always use with this
Aka, you fucked up with your security. Could you just once admit that?
I understand what you are saying, and what you want… but admitting fault publicly is a huge liability, as they have then stated it was their negligence that caused the issue. (bear with me and read this wall of text – or skip to the last paragraph)
I’ve worked in the Sec Ops space, and it’s an arms race all the time. There are tools to help identify issues and breaches quickly, but the attack surface is just not something that can be managed 100%. Even if you know there is a problem, you probably have to send an issue to a developer team to update their dependency and then they might need to change their code as well and get a code review approved and get a window to promote to production. A Zero-Day vulnerability is not something you can anticipate.
You’ve seen the XKCD of the software stack where a tiny peg is propping up the whole thing? The same idea applies to security, but the tiny peg is a supply chain attack where some dependency is either vulnerable, or attacked by malicious actors and through that gain access to your environment.
Maybe your developers leverage WidgetX1Z library for their app, and the WidgetX1Z library just updated with a change-log that looks reasonable, but the new code has a backdoor that allows an attacker to compromise your developers computer. They now have a foothold in your environment even with rigorous controls. I’ve yet to meet a developer who didn’t need, or at least want, full admin rights on their box. You now have an attacker with local admin inside your network. They might trip alarms, but by then the damage might be done and they were able to harvest the dev database of user accounts and send it back home. That dev database was probably a time-delayed copy of prod, so that the developer could be entirely sure there were no negative impacts of their changes.
I’m not saying this is what happened to Plex, but the idea that modern companies even CAN fully control the data they have is crazy. Unless you are doing full code reviews of all third-party libraries and changes or writing everything in-house (which would be insane), with infallible review, you cannot fully protect against a breach. And even then I’m not sure.
The real threat here is what data do companies collect about us? If all they have is a username, password and company-specific data, then the impact of a breach is not that big – you, as a consumer, should not re-use a password. When they collect tons of other information about us such as age, race, location, gender, sex, orientation, habits, preferences, contacts, partners, politics, etc, then those details become available for anyone willing to pay. We should use breach notifications like this to push for stronger data laws that prevent companies from collecting, storing, buying or selling personal data about their customers. It is literally impossible for a company to fully protect that information, so it should not be allowed.
A great place to start is data privacy laws. If they don’t collect unnecessary PII, it can’t be exposed.
But yes, companies need to face more liability. While it’s true that no one is inhackable - you’d need to be perfect everywhere all the time and the bad guys only need one break to succeed - there are best practices that make it a lot more unlikely. If you as a company have been hacked and you’re not taking good care of your customers data, you should be liable for carelessness. Admittedly following good data security practices can be expensive but that’s why there should be consequences for those who cut corners
I fully agree: Companies and their leadership should be held accountable when they cut corners and disregard customer data security. The ideal solution would be that a company is required to not store any information beyond what is required to provide the service, a la GDPR, but with a much stricter limit. I would put “marketing” outside that boundary. As a youtube user, you need literally nothing, maybe a username and password to retain history and inferred preferences, but trying to collect info about me should be punished. If your company can’t survive without targeted content, your company should not survive.
In bygone days, your car’s manufacturer didn’t know anything about you and we still bought cars. Not to start a whole new thread, but this ties in to right-to-repair and subscriptions for features as well. I did not buy a license to the car, I bought the fucking car; a license to use the car is called a lease.
i had to argue with some friends that when a breach happen and the company did not do everything in they’re power to prevent it, then it is the company’s fault.
They argued that bad actor should never do bad things, even it they are at hands reach.
If a company exposes an s3 bucket with clients data publicly, the company is 100% at fault if someone discovers it and sell the data. ofc the guy would be liable too.
I’m no lawyer, but wouldn’t that basically open them up to an instant win for anyone who files lawsuits against them?
Yes and no. hacking isn’t new. Everyone could get sued technically for security breaches for not taking enough interest in their own security.
But then it’s ridiculous if you could sue your own grandma cuz you once used her computer to print your resume and because she uses default passwords now someone has all your info you had from anything you left behind.
Ransom and hacking is pretty common unfortunately in the industry. And it is in part on the user to also take practices to protect themselves if they haven’t enabled 2F yet. And there’s way more you can do where you make email masks now and simply do not fill in with your accurate information like don’t use your real name.and use a VPN. Store stuff on ext drives and less on clouds that don’t use e2e encryption
I don’t know if it’s perfect but as a user just always have it back in your mind that your information can be obtained(if you ever used a web service to check your info on the dark web, this is pretty much going to be a given) . And it probably has. So maybe at least you can try to control what gets obtained.
In some ways 2fa is a weak spot even disregarding recovery processes being open to social engineering, now you’re giving a verified identifier uniquely tied to you
I generate unique email addresses and passwords for every account but can’t realistically do that with phone numbers
2fa by sms or voice isn’t especially secure anyway since you’re open to sim attacks and social engineering. I have a lot more hope for Passkeys but don’t really trust the practical advice arts of managing them yet
Depends on how good the lawyers were that wrote the thing you said you read when signing up.
No one is safe from hackers. Everyone and every company will get hacked, it’s unavailable. What matters is how they react to the inevitable because that’s how best practices are made.
It was securedly hashed! We used ROT13! Twice! We’re fucking professionals!
It’s possible to use salts, peppers, and key stretching algorithms that repeatedly hash a password like 100,000 times. So yes, it’s possible to do so securely.
Ok, but what if it’s only hashed 80 000 times? Should I sue my provider?