The company states that user data remains secure and it continues to investigate the incident. Credit: Hernan4429 / Getty Images LastPass, maker of a popular password management application, revealed Thursday that an unauthorized party gained access to its development environment through a compromised developer account and stole some source code and proprietary technical information. An initial probe of the incident has revealed no evidence that customer data or encrypted password vaults were accessed by the intruder, CEO Karim Toubba stated in a company blog post.Toubba explained that the master passwords of the company’s users are protected by a zero-knowledge architecture, which prevents LastPass from knowing or accessing those passwords.“Our products and services are operating normally,” adds LastPass spokesperson Nikolett Bacso Albaum. “In response [to the incident], we immediately initiated an investigation, deployed containment and mitigation measures, and engaged a leading cybersecurity and forensics firm.” “While our investigation is ongoing,” she continues, “we have achieved a state of containment, implemented additional enhanced security measures, and see no further evidence of unauthorized activity.” Password managers an attractive targetWhile the motive of the people responsible for this LastPass incident is unknown, password managers are a challenging but attractive target for threat actors, observes Melissa Bischoping, an endpoint security research specialist with Tanium, an endpoint management and security company. “They unlock—quite literally—a treasure trove of access to hundreds of thousands of accounts and sensitive customer data in an instant, if they are breached,” she says.Also unknown is how the developer account was compromised. Presumably, LastPass had proper authentication controls in place, but sometimes “even strong authentication solutions are not enough for various reasons,” says Rajiv Pimplaskar, CEO of Dispersive Holdings, a secure access service edge provider. LastPass able to contain the damageTaylor Ellis, customer threat analyst at Horizon3.ai, an automated penetration testing as a service company, praises LastPass for the way it has handled the incident. “Whenever a breach occurs, many organizations fail to isolate the incident quickly, or they struggle with how to guide a proper security investigation,” she explains. “As an experienced security company, LastPass at least had the home team advantage by following the correct procedures, isolating the issue on time, and preventing their customers from being severely impacted by the breach.” Related content feature The CSO guide to top security conferences Tracking postponements, cancellations, and conferences gone virtual — CSO Online’s calendar of upcoming security conferences makes it easy to find the events that matter the most to you. By CSO Staff May 01, 2024 15 mins Technology Industry IT Skills Events feature 3 Windows vulnerabilities that may not be worth patching Some vulnerabilities eat up a security team’s time and resources yet provide little or nothing in the way of true protection. Some may even introduce more risk to a network. By Susan Bradley May 01, 2024 7 mins Windows Security Patch Management Software Security Practices news analysis Chinese threat actor engaged in multi-year DNS resolver probing effort The unusual and persistent probing activity over the span of multiple years should be a reminder to organizations to identify and remove all open DNS resolvers from their networks. By Lucian Constantin Apr 30, 2024 7 mins Cyberattacks Network Security news Securiti adds distributed LLM firewalls to secure genAI applications The new offering is aimed at protecting against prompt injection, data leakage, and training data poisoning in LLM systems. By Shweta Sharma Apr 30, 2024 4 mins Generative AI PODCASTS VIDEOS RESOURCES EVENTS SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe