As more people flock over to the fediverse from reddit, twitter and other centralised proprietary networks it is important that you keep your e-mail and other important accounts safe from hijacking attempts. Since anyone can simply spin up an instance and host users and communities it is important that you don’t divulge your internet personal details to anyone as these can be harvested by the instance owner and by any instance you erroneously try to login to or simply the instance could be hacked and the user data harvasted. With this in mind here are some suggestions for good OPSEC (Operation Security):
- Don’t use your main e-mail address. Either create a new one or better sign up for an e-mail forwarding service and set-up forwarding addresses for each instance you sign up to. Since these are throw away addresses, if it gets leaked you can just delete the address and create a new one without compromising your main e-mail address. (Bonus: this can also be used to use unique addresses for traditional web services and make it easy to know how and from where an address got leaked)
Here is a nice article with some e-mail forwarding providers to get you started
- Use a password manager and generate strong and unique passwords for any and all instances and services you use, this way you won’t divulge a password used on another account to the instance owner, or if the address used (especially if you used your main e-mail address)/got leaked your account will still be safe from hijacking by attempting to use password dictionaries to guess the password.
Some passvault suggestions:
- Passbolt (self hosted)
- Bitwarden (self hosted and hosted options)
- Vaultwarden (unlocked self hosted alternative to bitwarden)
These are my main security suggestions for all you new and existing lemmings. Feel free to suggest other security considerations to have and other services beyond those mentioned. Stay safe and have fun posting and commenting.
The advice to always use a unique password per site is an excellent one.
The why is multifaceted, and some of them are moderately complex.
First off, not every site is going to be storing your password in a good a secure manner.
In an ideal world, every site on the planet would be hashing it with something like bcrypt with a fairly aggressive cost setting, and good salts.
And they would have a way to automatically rehash your password on login in the event that the password hashing settings change. (Almost everyone misses this one.)
In practice… It could be stored in plain text. It could be hashed with classic crypt(), or with md5 or sha1 with no salt. There are so many ways to get it wrong.
On the rehashing one, they could have picked something that was best practices at the time, you setup your account, and then two years later, best practices have changed, it turns out that there was a way to attack the previous way, so they change how they do it… And that’s great for everyone who changes their password or sets up a new account after that change, but everyone who did it before that change? Well, those passwords are just sitting there hashed by the old method indefinitely.
Or someone could compromise the site, and grab every password everyone enters.
Or you could fall prey to a phishing attack, and type your login to what looks exactly like the site in question, but is infact a common typo of the real domain.
Again, there are a lot of ways for the password used on a site to get compromised. Many of those ways are entirely out of your control. It is standard practice for attackers to attempt to use that password and username / email on other services when this happens, just so that they can see what else they can get into.
Don’t let that work.