Yeah, I know. 3 BTC.
Still, I was wondering - is there a new vulnerability out there I don't know about?
I'm trying to think of all the vectors that could have led to this. I have accessed my account from a PC at work, my personal Macbook Pro, and my Android tablet. The credentials are also stored with LastPass, with a >20-character pseudorandom passphrase protecting them.
My MtGox password was woefully weak, something I hadn't noticed because honestly, LastPass removed it from my line of sight. It consisted of 6 characters, the first four of which was an English word and the last 2 a number that looked like a recent year. That has been corrected. It had been changed since the "big" MtGox break-in, though, so I don't think that was it.
I'm not really upset about this, but rather more interested to find out how it happened. I also don't blame MtGox, unless they did something stupid like allow my account to be bruteforced - but I have no indication this occurred.
Interested as well...
You're saying that your woefully weak password had been changed for more than a year? How strong is the new one, and when exactly did you change to the new one?
No, my password was changed a week or two after the break-in, whenever that was. I'm not a very active user of Bitcoin, and certainly not of MtGox. Apparently, I decided to use a very weak password then, probably for expediency, since I knew of the hack and changed it just in case I forgot later.
Interesting...
I'd put money on the weak password being "guessed", but I am not sure how much MtGox does to stop guessers. Still, someone with a large botnet could have them all trying various combinations of passwords with various usernames derived from that MtGox hack list until they find one that works. That'd get around any IP-based bruteforce detection. English word + two digits is probably fairly high on the list of "to try" combinations for dictionary attacks.
Even with the information I've given here, there are still somewhere between 900k and 2m permutations for that password. IP-based locks are one thing - but if an account had attempted to log in tens of thousands of times, you'd think they'd lock the account.
No, the person who did this almost certainly knew my password, either through obtaining a hash and applying a rainbow table to it, through some sort of keylogger, intercepting it on the wire, or through having access to it on another site. I don't *think* the last one is the case.
A MitM seems quite complex for this. I'm thinking the most likely scenario at this point is a either a vulnerability in MtGox's site, or someone at my workplace with access to their corporate "Big Brother" crap.
If no one else is complaining, I'm leaning heavily toward the latter - which is not to discount my own culpability, even a little. At the time I set that password, I was a fairly technical user but somewhat naive security-wise. That's by far the most likely, that they've had my password for months and have waited to use it.
Odd they chose now - I've been playing the market for a few weeks, starting with 1 BTC and working my way up to the 3 that was lost. They must not be checking often.
I hope I get ahold of account login logs
That would give me something to chew on.