“In my opinion, they are doing a world-class job detecting incidents and a really, really crummy job preventing issues and responding transparently,” says Evan Johnson, a security engineer who worked at LastPass more than seven years ago. In characterizing the scale of the situation, the company said in its announcement that hackers were “able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container.” The company also did not respond to WIRED's questions about what it calls “a proprietary binary format” it uses to store encrypted and unencrypted vault data. If attackers have had three or four months with the stolen data, the situation is even more urgent for impacted LastPass users than if hackers have had only a few weeks. It seems to have been sometime after August 2022, but the timing is significant, because a big question is how long it will take attackers to start “cracking,” or guessing, the keys used to encrypt the stolen password vaults. The company hasn't even clarified when the breach occurred. LastPass has not returned WIRED's multiple requests for comment about how many password vaults were compromised in the breach and how many users were affected. Now, nearly a week since the disclosure, the company has not provided additional information to confused and worried customers.

The details LastPass provided about the situation a week ago were worrying enough that security professionals quickly started calling for users to switch to other services.

For the security service's 25.6 million users, though, the company made a worrying announcement on December 22: A security incident the firm had previously reported (on November 30) was actually a massive and concerning data breach that exposed encrypted password vaults-the crown jewels of any password manager-along with other user data. And if you finally took the plunge with a free and mainstream option, particularly during the 2010s, it was probably LastPass.

You've heard it again and again: You need to use a password manager to generate strong, unique passwords and keep track of them for you.

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