Important Notice of Security Incident
forums.plex.tv
We have recently experienced a security incident that may potentially involve your Plex account information. We believe the actual impact of this incident is limited; however, action is required from you to ensure your account remains secure. What happened An unauthorized third party accessed a limited subset of customer data from one of our databases. While we quickly contained the incident, information that was accessed included emails, usernames, securely hashed passwords and authentication ...

We have recently experienced a security incident that may potentially involve your Plex account information. We believe the actual impact of this incident is limited; however, action is required from you to ensure your account remains secure.

What happened

An unauthorized third party accessed a limited subset of customer data from one of our databases. While we quickly contained the incident, information that was accessed included emails, usernames, securely hashed passwords and authentication data.

Any account passwords that may have been accessed were securely hashed, in accordance with best practices, meaning they cannot be read by a third party. Out of an abundance of caution, we recommend you take some additional steps to secure your account (see details below). Rest assured that we do not store credit card data on our servers, so this information was not compromised in this incident.

What we’re doing

We’ve already addressed the method that this third party used to gain access to the system, and we’re undergoing additional reviews to ensure that the security of all of our systems is further strengthened to prevent future attacks.

What you must do

If you use a password to sign into Plex: We kindly request that you reset your Plex account password immediately by visiting https://plex.tv/reset. When doing so, there’s a checkbox to “Sign out connected devices after password change,” which we recommend you enable. This will sign you out of all your devices (including any Plex Media Server you own) for your security, and you will then need to sign back in with your new password.

If you use SSO to sign into Plex: We kindly request that you log out of all active sessions by visiting https://plex.tv/security and clicking the button that says ”Sign out of all devices”. This will sign you out of all your devices (including any Plex Media Server you own) for your security, and you will then need to sign back in as normal.

Additional Security Measures You Can Take

We remind you that no one at Plex will ever reach out to you over email to ask for a password or credit card number for payments. For further account protection, we also recommend enabling two-factor authentication on your Plex account if you haven’t already done so.

Lastly, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this situation may cause you. We take pride in our security systems, which helped us quickly detect this incident, and we want to assure you that we are working swiftly to prevent potential future incidents from occurring.

For step-by-step instructions on how to reset your password, visit:https://support.plex.tv/articles/account-requires-password-reset

  • moseschrute@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    26 days ago

    I’m not a security expert, but password hashing is mostly to slow down someone from getting all the passwords. You can’t reverse the hash, but you can generate hashes until you find a match. When hashing, you can dial in how much compute it would take someone to try and solve all the hashes in your database. If you used a good password, it will be more difficult to solve your hashed password. But it’s best to change your password as Plex suggests.

    So it depends on how secure a password is and how strong of hashing Plex used when storing the hashed passwords. I have no idea if this is like a “this will take a year” or “this will take a billion years” to solve all the hashes. More compute also means you can solve the hashes faster. Maybe someone with a security background could chime in.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      You can’t reverse the hash, but you can generate hashes until you find a match.

      That’s called a rainbow table attack, and that’s why you should salt your hash. This salt basically appends a unique string of characters to every password before it goes into the hash. Let’s say your users are dumb and use “password” for their password. If a hacker has pre-generated a rainbow table, (which is extremely time and resource intensive), then they’ll instantly crack that as soon as they get a match on those common passwords. Even if they haven’t generated a rainbow table, they can just look for identical hashes and guess that those users are using common passwords.

      But if you salt it, it’ll slow the hackers down drastically by invalidating their pre-generated table. Each user has their own salt stored alongside the username and hash, so User 1’s hash actually saw “password19,jJ03pa5/-@“ while user 2’s hash saw “passwords)205JrGp02?@-“. Because each of their salts are unique, their resulting hashes are unique too. Even though they used the same password. Now the hackers need to crack the hash for each user, by incorporating the existing salts for each user. They’ll start with the weak and common passwords first, which is why it’s still best practice to use strong passwords. But they can’t actually start the rainbow table process until after they have hacked the info, and they’ll need to create fresh tables for every single user.

      • BackgrndNoize@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        26 days ago

        So is this user specific salt word stored in a table somewhere, how does the company decrypt a salted password otherwise, and so if the salt is also stored somewhere alongside the encrypted password, couldn’t the hacker get his hands on both the salt and the password and use that to figure out the password?

  • thebudman420@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    26 days ago

    I used to have a Plex account but it has been many many years since i used it although i did use a stupid hard long password for it that i don’t use for anything else. I am not even sure if i remember that password to go change the pass and or delete the old account. I used to store all kinds of TV series but i quit collecting TV series and deleted all or most of that anyway. Was neat for awhile that it allowed pause resume and remembered what episodes and had the description and box art and play time and accessible on all my devices to stream over LAN. But i don’t need it. I can just open vlc or kodi on fire tv and i share a folder samba / smb and that works perfectly. I also quit watching tv years ago so i have no use for it. Storing all the information also took too much of my hard drive space when i don’t have a lot. Games became too huge and i need space for that and for other iso files for different operating systems.

      • Logical@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        26 days ago

        But if you just run it locally an a media server in your home, and you don’t expose the service to the internet, that doesn’t really matter? Though perhaps more people connect to their Jellyfin instances remotely than I realize.

        • cosmo@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          26 days ago

          Well. If you’re not streaming why have such a service in the first place? If I didn’t stream remotely with Plex (and share with my friends and family) I’d just go back to running Kodi on my htpc like I did ten years ago.

          • nonfuinoncuro@lemmy.zipEnglish
            01·
            25 days ago

            steam locally to multiple devices plus for remote streaming I just VPN into my home network