
#Kypass help software
Interestingly, KeePass goes out of its way to stop your passwords being sniffed out when you use them, including using tamper-protection techniques to stop various keylogger tricks even from users who already have sysadmin powers.īut the KeePass software also makes it surprisingly easy to capture plaintext password data, perhaps in ways you might consider “too easy”, even for non-administrators. Note that I don’t need Administrator privileges, because I don’t need to mess with the actual installation directory where the KeePass app gets stored, which is typically off-limits to regular users.Īnd I don’t need access to any locked-down global configuration settings. …and I can surprisingly easily steal your plaintext passwords, either in bulk, for example by dumping the whole database as an unencrypted CSV file, or as you use them, for example by setting a “program hook” that triggers every time you access a password from the database. If I have write access to your personal files, including your so-called %APPDATA% directory, I can sneakily tweak the configuration section to modify any KeePass settings that you have already customised, or to add customisations if you haven’t knowingly changed anything… The claim about being able to obtain cleartext passwords, unfortunately, is true. The bug has been dubbed CVE-2023-24055: Attacker who has write access to the XML configuration file obtain the cleartext passwords by adding an export trigger.

We’re referring to it as a vulnerability here because it does have an official bug identifier, issued by the US National Institute for Standards and Technology. Now it’s KeePass’s turn to be in the news, this time for yet another cybersecurity issue: an alleged vulnerability, the jargon term used for software bugs that lead to cybersecurity holes that attackers might be able to exploit for evil purposes. LifeLock itself hadn’t been breached, but some of its users had, thanks to password-sharing behaviour caused by risks they might not even remember having taken.Ĭompetitiors 1Password and BitWarden have been in the news recently, too, based on reports of malicious ads, apparently unwittingly aired by Google, that convincingly lured users to replica logon pages aimed at phishing their account details.


Then it was LifeLock’s turn to be all over the news, when the company warned about what looked like a rash of password guessing attacks, probably based on passwords stolen from a completely different website, possibly some time ago, and perhaps purchased on the dark web recently. (The plaintext passwords themselves weren’t stolen, because the vaults were encrypted, and LastPass didn’t have copies of anyone’s “master key” for the backup vault files themselves, but it was a closer shave than most people were happy to hear.) It’s been a newsworthy few weeks for password managers – those handy utilities that help you come up with a different password for every website you use, and then to keep track of them all.Īt the end of 2022, it was the turn of LastPass to be all over the news, when the company finally admitted that a breach it suffered back in August 2022 did indeed end up with customers’ password vaults getting stolen from the cloud service where they were backed up.
