The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Let's look at the how first. It would appear that due to
some sloppy coding, there was a bug in the Spotify system which meant
that it had been possible to access the password hashes of individual
users.
The vulnerability was both discovered and
fixed on December 19th 2008. However, until that date it meant that it
was possible to reverse engineer the Spotify encrypted streaming
protocol and potentially brute force weak passwords of known users.
The same vulnerability also potentially exposed, along with the
password hashes, full registration information including email address,
date of birth, gender, postal code and billing receipt details.
Because credit card payments were not stored, with payments handled by
a secure 3rd part payments provider, these were never at risk of
exposure. There are several important clues here with which the impact
of this breach becomes reduced.
First, it only effects those users with an account created on or before
December 19th 2008. Second, only those with weak passwords which were also used for
other online sites and services are at any real risk.
Spotify have made it quite clear that it was not the passwords but the
password hashes that may have been exposed. These hashes were salted,
so the hackers would not be able to attack them using rainbow tables.
However, individual weak passwords could be vulnerable to brute force
and dictionary attacks, but not in parallel. The chances of a hacker
having got your individual password hash on time, and devoted more time
to cracking it just to access a free service is, well, pretty minimal.
So, sure, let's give Spotify a spanking for allowing this to happen but
let's not crucify them on a cross of media misunderstanding. Now if you want
to get the crown of thorns out for the potential misuse of that other
personal information mentioned, that's a different story altogether.
David Bass
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