A Slack Bug Uncovered Some Customers’ Hashed Passwords for five Years

The workplace communication platform Slack is thought for being straightforward and intuitive to make use of. However the firm stated on Friday that considered one of its low-friction options contained a vulnerability, now mounted, that uncovered cryptographically scrambled variations of some customers’ passwords.
When customers created or revoked a hyperlink—generally known as a “shared invite hyperlink”—that others might use to enroll in a given Slack workspace, the command additionally inadvertently transmitted the hyperlink creator’s hashed password to different members of that workspace. The flaw impacted the password of anybody who made or scrubbed a shared invite hyperlink over a five-year interval, between April 17, 2017, and July 17, 2022.
Slack, which is now owned by Salesforce, says a safety researcher disclosed the bug to the corporate on July 17, 2022. The errant passwords weren’t seen wherever in Slack, the corporate notes, and will have solely been apprehended by somebody actively monitoring related encrypted community visitors from Slack’s servers. Although the corporate says it is unlikely that the precise content material of any passwords had been compromised on account of the flaw, it notified impacted customers on Thursday and compelled password resets for all of them.
Slack stated the scenario impacted about 0.5 p.c of its customers. In 2019 the corporate stated it had greater than 10 million day by day energetic customers, which might imply roughly 50,000 notifications. By now, the corporate might have almost doubled that variety of customers. Some customers who had passwords uncovered all through the 5 years might not nonetheless be Slack customers right now.
“We instantly took steps to implement a repair and launched an replace the identical day the bug was found, on July seventeenth, 2022,” the corporate stated in an announcement. “Slack has knowledgeable all impacted prospects and the passwords for impacted customers have been reset.”
The corporate didn’t reply to questions from WIRED by press time about which hashing algorithm it used on the passwords or whether or not the incident has prompted broader assessments of Slack’s password-management structure.
“It is unlucky that in 2022 we’re nonetheless seeing bugs which can be clearly the results of failed risk modeling,” says Jake Williams, director of cyber-threat intelligence on the safety agency Scythe. “Whereas purposes like Slack undoubtedly carry out safety testing, bugs like this that solely come up in edge case performance nonetheless get missed. And clearly, the stakes are very excessive in the case of delicate information like passwords.”
The scenario underscores the problem of designing versatile and usable net purposes that additionally silo and restrict entry to high-value information like passwords. In the event you obtained a notification from Slack, change your password, and be sure you have two-factor authentication turned on. You can too view the entry logs in your account.
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