Eharmony Password Dump Forums
The length of a password is. “The eHarmony dump is just further proof that organizations need to not only. The forums have been shut down as a result. The shorter the password, the higher the chance it can quickly be cracked. EHarmony's 1.5 million password hashes were released in a forum of a Russian password-cracking website called InsidePro, reported Ars Technica.
Unless you've been hauled up in a bunker, eating MREs and watching Doomsday Preppers marathons, you've likely heard of the recent compromise of over 1.5 million eHarmony password hashes. After a little work tracking down the hashes, we launched several attacks against them, hoping to recover at least 75% of the plaintext passwords. Roughly 72 hours were spent cracking the hashes over the course of a week. This netted 1,215,846 of 1,513,935 (80%) plaintext passwords.
Password cracking was performed on a custom built system using off-the-shelf parts totaling less than $1,500 utilizing three NVIDIA 460GTX graphics cards (GPUs) as the primary medium for the password cracking process. The majority of cracking was done using oclHashcat, part of the Hashcat password cracking suite. Secondary cracking was done using John the Ripper.
The dump shows that the passwords were stored in a non-salted MD5 format. While this is far better than storing plaintext passwords, it's also far from best practice. MD5 has been long
considered in adequate for password storage.
After cracking was completed, password analysis began. The first thing we noticed was that no lowercase characters we present in any of the plaintext passwords. This means that not only was eHarmony storing passwords in the weak MD5 format, they were also case-insensitive. All lowercase alphabetical characters were converted to uppercase before hashing. This drastically reduces the time it takes to crack, as there are far less possibilities. Using a full 95 character keyboard, bruteforcing an 8 character password gives us 6.6342x1015 possbilities. For eHarmony, this is reduced to 5.13798374 × 1014, due to the loss of the lowercase characters. Next we noticed, that no single password was found more than three times. This brings into question the integrity of the original dump and the possibility of modification by the dumper.
Since no password was seen more than three times, we can't really generate a most commonly used password. What we can do is look for the most common patterns or base words. Below are some of the interesting things we found.
The most popular length of password was seven characters. Followed closely by six characters and eight characters. Expectedly, the percentages drop drastically as you go higher in length.
Length of Passwords:
5 = 46628 (4%)
6 = 253347 (21%)
7 = 279971 (23%)
8 = 230315 (19%)
9 = 169252 (14%)
10 = 145894 (12%)
11 = 47911 (4%)
12 = 25490 (2%)
13 = 10964 (1%)
14 = 5779 (.5%)
15 = 378 (0%)
One interesting statistic here is that 99.5% of passwords do not contain a special character. The majority of passwords contained letters and numbers, which is an improvement compared to other dumps we've seen.
Password Composition:
Letters and Digits - 696688 (57%)
Letters Only - 499531 (41%)
Digits Only - 18381 (1.5%)
Letters Digits and Special Chars - 629 (0%)
Letters and Special Chars - 548 (0%)
Special Chars and Digits - 45 (0%)
We found it interesting that we saw the Top 100 dogs names more often than the top 100 baby girl names. Also, that National Football League teams were seen less than National Hockey League teams. Does this say anything about eHarmony demographics?
Passwords containing the following:
Top 100 baby Boy Names of 2011 - 47,478 (4%)
Top 100 baby Girl Names of 2011 - 25,670 (2%)
Top 100 Dog Names of 2011 - 41,700 (3.5%)
Months of the Year (Abbr.) - 26,358 (2%)
Days of the week (Abbr.) - 12,492 (1%)
Years 2000 through 2012 - 13,143 (1%)
Top 25 Worst Passwords of 2011 - 4,894 (.5%)
National Football League Team Names - 1,367 (0%)
Major League Baseball Team Names - 8,725 (1%)
National Hockey League Team Names - 2,491 (.5%)
100 Most Populated US cities - 2,392 (0%)
100 Most Populated World Cities - 2,197 (0%)
Curse Words - 10,144 (1%)
Below are numbers on specially chosen words and are not the 'top' base words. That being said, we saw some very interesting things here too. Generally known as the most common word in passwords, 'PASSWORD' was only found in 240 passwords. 'LOVE' was found most often of all the words we checked, which is not surprising due to the fact that these are password from eHarmony users. Also interesting to us, was that we found 'DOG' more than twice as often as we found 'GOD'. Would that hold true if this were a Christianmingle.com dump?
Interesting Base Words:
LOVE - 10,690
DOG - 5,481
1234 - 3,526
LUV - 3,991
SEX - 2,616
GOD - 2,445
ANGEL - 1,703
LOVER - 1,325
123456 - 830
JESUS - 748
DATE - 683
HARMONY - 656
EHARMONY - 383
FOREVER - 337
PASSWORD - 240
Warez Password Dump
Lastly, we looked to see how many digits were used in passwords, regardless of their position. We found it odd that more passwords contained four digits than any other. In close second place was two digits, followed by one digit.
Passwords
Number of passwords with the following:
1 digit - 148296 (12%)
2 digits - 179901 (14.5%)
3 digits - 99972 (8%)
4 digits - 204685 (16%)
5 digits - 26167 (2%)
6 digits - 28737 (2%)
7 digits - 3647 (.5%)
8 digits - 4567 (.5%)
9 digits - 6733 (.5%)
10 digits - 12415 (1%)
Over 10 digits - 638 (0%) 802.11g wireless lan pci adapter driver.
We did however, find a surprisingly high number of passwords following the patterns of either (d=digit): ddEHARMdd, ddddEHARM, or EHARMdddd. We tested to see if this pattern was used by eHarmony as password reset defaults, but this does not appear to be the case. There is still a possibility that eHarmony may be resetting passwords as part of a lockout functionality, but we have no way of testing this. What we did discover during these tests was yet another eHarmony password policy failure. During our tests, we reset the password for an eHarmony account several times. Each time, we found that the passwords were reset to a five-character password using only letters and digits. While the password appears to be using uppercase and lowercase letters, we know that the hashes use only uppercase. Bruteforcing five characters, under these circumstances, can be done in less than 10 seconds while utilizing at least one GPU.
In conclusion, we found numerous irregularities in this password dump. While we saw many patterns we expected, we also saw many more that surprised us. The eHarmony dump is just further proof that organizations need to not only store passwords in stronger, salted formats than was previously acceptable, but also need to enforce stronger case-sensitive password policies. Users, as a whole, still do not understand the need for strong passwords, and will continue to set passwords that meet only the minimum requirements.
Well with little sleep to go on I keep reading the articles from the supposed LinkedIn hack. There was a lot of incomplete information floating around yesterday. To start off with these hashes were posted on a forum (we all know this already) but the “hacker” was asking for help to crack the hashes … and from what I see, not gloating about a LinkedIn hack.
What else do we see? Well it was another user on the forum that pointed out the suspicious connection to LinkedIn. All of this from the forum at insidepro.com The page http://forum.insidepro.com/viewtopic.php?p=96122 looks to be the main thread of the LinkedIn hashes (thanks to Google Cache for keeping this) but insidepro.com has deleted the thread for obvious reasons. Just do a little Google hacking and you should be able to see it all for yourself. Start with “dwdm” linkedin site:forum.insidepro.com and your cache awaits.
Now there is also one thing that the majority of tweets and blog posts overlooked yesterday. eHarmony.com apparently also got nailed in this hack when apparently someone else made a connection to eharmony in another hash list posted by the same guy (dwdm).
“Experts said that the fact that some of the passwords included the phrase “eHarmony” indicated they were taken from the online dating website, which has more than 20 million members worldwide.” – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9316218/LinkedIn-hacker-also-stole-1.5m-passwords-from-dating-site-eHarmony.html The smaller of the two lists is a wee bit different. The hashes are not SHA1 but MD5. This does indicate that the hashes are from a different source.
This is a little piece of one of the “cracked” lists that was posted on the forum for this file.
84f928034c38d9a079d8bd411d820a1f:ILUVCAMERON
57bccd751f2ee5e91bcd3dbe86e81720:ILOVEMARTIN
0a9b4c74cdac8e956a0b21e89099dd21:ELLAMATTHEW
379f947f5e5c61a2373a60988ea92322:COLLINS3411
c5c89c1e4fed2740b58f4fec1e4e2823:HARMONYBABY
bdacef83f0e50d07c2d70e863ea1e523:ELCHAVODEL8
f7701c0adaa1520303c45edb32b0f923:DIVAGODDESS
7f87b6d82415be6d23997ff269042c24:ILOVESANDRA
330aa67a7344a92ebd189ef36d441225:ILOVESOPHIE
15833c399862b6109de6d5dd75481925:LINDS103086
a7d88acd2b1933c35903811dbe4f2c25:JULIANA2323
So what does eHarmony have to say about all this? Well pretty much the same public relations BS that LinkedIn spewed out. If you want to read the propaganda it is right here http://advice.eharmony.com/blog/2012/06/06/update-on-compromised-passwords/ So basically the procedure here is to calm the users down, wait out the storm, and hopefully everyone forgets about it the next time Sony gets hacked. REALLY!? As users of these services are we not entitled to a full explanation of the exploit, what was done to repair it, and what will be done to prevent further issues? This really pisses me off as a LinkedIn user, because they are now probably all sitting back thinking that they have dealt with the issue. Sure from a people point of view you have, but what about the underlaying technology that is the root cause? We will never hear about it I am sure.
Well with this new information, and other articles that I have read on the net … maybe these hashes are from linkedin.com and eharmony.com OK maybe I was wrong, and the two sites did get hacked. One thing I am still skeptical about though is who hacked the sites, and how did this dwdm guy get his/her hands on the hashes? Surely anyone who can hack these sites and dump the hashes would know how to download a rainbow table and go to town … right?
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So once again I start to think a little. Where did these hashes come from? Well as most of us all know the internet goes way beyond the reaches of Google into the digital abyss where you can buy anything, and I mean ANYTHING! I will not go into details here about how to dive into this world because many have already done it. One great example is this article http://www.csoonline.com/article/705316/how-online-black-markets-work So maybe our friend dwdm had some bitcoins just laying around and came across a K-Mart blue light special on hash files. You know buy the LinkedIn hashes and get the eHarmony hashes for FREE! Probably not the case, but has it come to the point where “hackers” can break into a web site and don’t know jack about cryptography?
Sure I can sit back and rant and rave about how these guys and gals don’t know everything … but neither do I … or anyone for that matter. What I can say though is if they were not publicly available I wouldn’t be touching those files with a 10 foot pole! These people have got balls. Now if they do this out of curiosity, or if they have malicious intent it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the outcome of this. What have we all learned?
1. Storing passwords using SHA1 isn’t good enough anymore LinkedIn
2. Really eHarmony MD5 Passwords are no better
3. Hackers like any other group will work together to reach a common goal
4. The public has been schooled a little bit on passwords … MAKE ‘EM LONG!
5. Most importantly eHarmony, and LinkedIn are now aware that they have a problem, and the public knows it too. They have to fix it.
6. Other web sites and companies should learn from LinkedIn’s, and eHarmony’s mistakes and fix their crap before it’s too late.
See if your eHarmony Password was Stolen
Once again I have been so nice and setup a (fairly ugly) PHP app for people to check if their eHarmony password was in the MD5 hash list. So go try it now [link removed]!
See if your LinkedIn Password was Stolen
I have created a simple PHP page that hashes your password and searches the hash list that I downloaded from yandex.ru and lets you know if your password was one of the 6.5 million Start [link removed]!
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