Right before the holiday season, LastPass published an update on their breach. As people have speculated, this timing was likely not coincidental but rather intentional to keep the news coverage low. Security professionals weren’t amused, this holiday season became a very busy time for them. LastPass likely could have prevented this if they were more concerned about keeping their users secure than about saving their face.

Their statement is also full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies. As I know that not everyone can see through all of it, I thought that I would pick out a bunch of sentences from this statement and give some context that LastPass didn’t want to mention.

Let’s start with the very first paragraph:

In keeping with our commitment to transparency, we want to provide you with an update regarding our ongoing investigation.

In fact, this has little to do with any commitment. LastPass is actually required by US law to immediately disclose a data breach. We’ll soon see how transparent they really are in their statement.

While no customer data was accessed during the August 2022 incident, some source code and technical information were stolen from our development environment and used to target another employee, obtaining credentials and keys which were used to access and decrypt some storage volumes within the cloud-based storage service.

LastPass is trying to present the August 2022 incident and the data leak now as two separate events. But using information gained in the initial access in order to access more assets is actually a typical technique used by threat actors. It is called lateral movement.

So the more correct interpretation of events is: we do not have a new breach now, LastPass rather failed to contain the August 2022 breach. And because of that failure people’s data is now gone. Yes, this interpretation is far less favorable of LastPass, which is why they likely try to avoid it.

Note also how LastPass avoids mentioning when this “target another employee” happened. It likely did already before they declared victory in September 2022, which also sheds a bad light on them.

The cloud storage service accessed by the threat actor is physically separate from our production environment.

Is that supposed to be reassuring, considering that the cloud storage in question apparently had a copy of all the LastPass data? Or is this maybe an attempt to shift the blame: “It wasn’t our servers that the data has been lifted from”?

To date, we have determined that once the cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys were obtained, the threat actor copied information from backup that contained basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service.

We learn here that LastPass was storing your IP addresses. And since they don’t state how many they were storing, we have to assume: all of them. And if you are an active LastPass user, that data should be good enough to create a complete movement profile. Which is now in the hands of an unknown threat actor.

Of course, LastPass doesn’t mention this implication, hoping that the less tech-savvy users won’t realize.

There is another interesting aspect here: how long did it take to copy the data for millions of users? Why didn’t LastPass detect this before the attackers were done with it? We won’t learn that in their statement.

The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage conta