TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Show HN: My wife's email was hacked, I created an app to protect online accounts

56 pointsby urbover 10 years ago

24 comments

PeterWhittakerover 10 years ago
Interesting. Potentially useful. Love it when people create new products. Very scary to put yourself out there like that. Especially in the security space.<p>From reading the site and URB&#x27;s comments on this page, LogDog appears to be a host intrusion detection (HID) package that works first in &quot;learning mode&quot; to establish a baseline set of acceptable or normal behaviours for any given user then eventually moves into notification mode in which it signals to the user that unusual activity has taken place.<p>Unusual, in this context, means anything outside the thresholds established during learning mode. Presumably, learning mode continues over time and the system becomes more refined.<p>So far, so good.<p>What&#x27;s not so good:<p>1. The basic premise is &quot;trust us, we know what to look for, but won&#x27;t tell you because we don&#x27;t want the bad guys to know&quot;. This is security through obscurity and I&#x27;m afraid I can characterize this only as &quot;charmingly naive&quot;. A) The bad guys already know, guaranteed. B) Unless you are truly expert in this area (see below), you don&#x27;t and are only guessing. I don&#x27;t want to harsh anyone&#x27;s mellow, but you need to be able to back up your claims - especially when you claim your product will make someone&#x27;s life more secure. We will consider believing your claims after we have read the research papers you are going to publish, the papers that provide enough information for thems of us who know this area to guess at your bona fides but not so much as to reveal all your secrets.<p>2. All data sent to servers is anonymized. So you say. I will take you at your word. But it means nothing, unless you have done the extremely hard work necessary to show that the data you maintain cannot in any way be used to establish identity after the fact, whether it be by patterns of behaviour or other means. This is an area of active security research and active attacks, and is not for the faint of heart. I invite you to research super cookies, click profiling, etc., etc.<p>3. Re #2: Your servers are now known to attackers who want that juicy high value data that they can probably do more with than you - unless you are as large and as well funded (they are both). Please describe, at least at a high level, how you are protecting this high value asset you have created. If you cannot, we cannot expect our data to be safe. Regardless of claims of anonymization. Convince us you understand defense in depth, prevent-detect-respond-recover, etc.<p>4. No offense, but this is a security product from someone with no documented (as far as we can tell) expertise or experience in this area. Everyone who has ever developed a security product from scratch has gotten the first release wrong. Every single time. This stuff is complex and complicated, it takes tremendous experience in the field to design a tool properly, let alone implement one, experience gained either from starting from scratch and surviving to release 4 or 5 or from working on other products developed by experts&#x2F;survivors.<p>URB, you may find comments herein and on this page to be assertive, even aggressive. None of us will apologize for this. You are making BOLD claims and providing no reasons for anyone to believe you know what you are doing. You need to do that work before the security community will accept this product.<p>Try to get hold of Bruce Schneier or another well-known, respected commenter in the field. If you can convince a few such people by giving them a privileged, behind the scenes view (they won&#x27;t sign your NDA, there is nothing for them in that), that will a) provide real marketing bumpf and b) go a long way to silencing many critics.<p>But note that you still need to address 2 and 3, even if you convince the best of the best of 1 and 4. Good luck, those are hard problems to solve.
评论 #8696546 未加载
评论 #8696604 未加载
评论 #8696348 未加载
评论 #8695854 未加载
tallesover 10 years ago
<p><pre><code> Hundreds of parameters are used to identify unauthorized access to your accounts. </code></pre> I would love to know how.<p>Seriously, no sarcasm here, I&#x27;m actually curious about those <i>hundreds of parameters</i>.
评论 #8694764 未加载
rbxsover 10 years ago
Refusing to explain how LogDog works, how should you trust them with your precious accounts?
jpetersonmnover 10 years ago
&quot;1 in 4 online accounts gets hacked.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve got hundreds of online accounts and so far none have been hacked. Where you getting this number from?<p>I think for you to be successful in this venture you&#x27;re going to have to be very transparent in how everything works, based on comments so far that&#x27;s not the case.
72deluxeover 10 years ago
Looks interesting. Does anyone else use Two-Factor authentication for their emails? I do.<p>I also use that SMS service for PayPal.<p>Does nobody else?
评论 #8694859 未加载
评论 #8695374 未加载
Mauricio_over 10 years ago
Do I have to believe the reddit-like story in the title? Looking at the website it looks way too professional to be something suddenly made out of the blue one day after your wife got hacked.
评论 #8695000 未加载
AdmiralAsshatover 10 years ago
Could you elaborate a bit on some of the things you&#x27;re checking for as signs of &quot;suspicious activity&quot;?<p>I ask because I receive warning emails on occasion from Gmail ever since I started routing all of my data through a rotating-server VPN. I imagine LogDog might send similar emails, which is not necessarily a bad thing--I&#x27;m just curious exactly what else you&#x27;re monitoring other than suspicious IP&#x2F;geolocation.
评论 #8694631 未加载
pzxcover 10 years ago
I don&#x27;t understand how it works or could possibly work. How is your app going to detect that someone is accessing one of my accounts from Israel, as indicated in your screenshot?<p>Do you have software running on google&#x27;s servers so that it knows what IP addresses are accessing gmail&#x2F;evernote&#x2F;one of the other services and can geolocate? (Obviously not). So how is this supposed to work?
评论 #8694659 未加载
nerdyover 10 years ago
&quot;Don&#x27;t get hacked, get a LogDog&quot;<p>From what I can tell this service does absolutely nothing to protect you from being hacked.<p>It&#x27;s more like a &quot;you might&#x27;ve been hacked&quot; notification.
评论 #8694813 未加载
Khaoover 10 years ago
So to protect myself I have to give out ALL my credentials to this new app? No thanks.
评论 #8694661 未加载
tallesover 10 years ago
Sorry if I&#x27;m going to sound a little <i>childish</i> but...<p>What if my LogDog is hacked? What kind of <i>thing</i> will the attacker be able to do with whatever LogDog has about my accounts everywhere?
评论 #8694706 未加载
deweyover 10 years ago
Wouldn&#x27;t a third party service repeatedly logging into my services from a LogDog IP raise some flag on it&#x27;s own at the service&#x27;s own intrusion detection?
评论 #8694838 未加载
jbob2000over 10 years ago
I don&#x27;t know the situation with your wife&#x27;s email... but if she had a poor enough password that it was easy enough to hack OR if she didn&#x27;t update her password after heartbleed etc., then why do you think she will be proactive enough to use LogDog?<p>(Obviously she will, because she&#x27;s your wife, but the question is if people aren&#x27;t proactive to keep their accounts safe, will they be proactive enough to use your service?)
评论 #8694629 未加载
评论 #8694605 未加载
评论 #8694736 未加载
Derbastiover 10 years ago
So I prevent getting hacked by giving some random app the login details to all the services that could be used to fake my identity. Makes sense.
mralvarover 10 years ago
First Show HN where I&#x27;ve seen someone have a phone number listed. Not sure if smart, or brave.
tmikaeldover 10 years ago
Is it open source? How does it work?<p>This info is kind of important if you are posting on HN!
评论 #8694582 未加载
MrQuincleover 10 years ago
From what I can see he crawls the website as a user would do. He logs in to Google just via <a href="https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=mail&amp;continue=https://mail.google.com/mail/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;accounts.google.com&#x2F;ServiceLogin?service=mail&amp;contin...</a>, two-factor authentication might involve user interaction.<p>Session information (about other sessions) from for example Facebook can be obtained through <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ajax/settings/security/sessions.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;ajax&#x2F;settings&#x2F;security&#x2F;sessions.php</a>
ganga98over 10 years ago
two comments -- 1. Since your app is free what&#x27;s in it for you ? You mentioned in other comments that passwords are never shared with your app, however, you do continuous polling and create profile. Are you going to sell this data to advertising for behavior targeting and advertising ? Amount of information you know what a particular user is using and how they are using it ( due to continuous monitoring ) is way too much intruding in my opinion.<p>2. What if , my account gets hacked due to logdog ? You approach is not too convincing since you even did not answer other users question on what parameters you are monitoring. Sophisticated hackers might take advantage of your service and hack into my account. Do you assume liability and loss that would occur because of your service ? I don&#x27;t want to sound rude but putting cheesy story in headline might get you temporary attention but this service is no better than saying &quot;we will watch out who will rob your bank and then directly or indirectly responsible for lost money&quot;
ada1981over 10 years ago
Your press kit was not accessible as of the time of this post via the link you provide:<p><a href="https://getlogdog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Logdog.zip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getlogdog.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;08&#x2F;Logdog.zip</a>
tomtoiseover 10 years ago
Hate to be that guy, but in About Us you have a minor typo; &quot;Having one of your online accounts hacked and loosing all your..&quot; should read; &quot;Having one of your online accounts hacked and losing all your..&quot;
评论 #8695832 未加载
评论 #8694552 未加载
discardoramaover 10 years ago
Does it run client-side (device), or server-side? I ask, because if you&#x27;re without a net connection, will LogDog still monitor your accounts (if it&#x27;s server-side, it will, I guess)?
64mbover 10 years ago
How does this protect me any more than 2FA does?
评论 #8705420 未加载
darkarmaniover 10 years ago
Typo:<p>&gt; &quot;loosing all your data&quot;
jdalgettyover 10 years ago
I love the skepticism!