[psycr]

That's good to hear. As a future suggestion to anyone else who finds themselves in this unfortunate situation - including some technical granularity in your press release can go miles in offering reassurance to your technical audience/users.

[jasonlotito]

Why? Honestly asking: what difference does this have on the end result? Now that you know they are using scrypt, how will that impact your actions?

You could say that this has a bearing on whether you continue to use the service, but if that were the case, wouldn't it be better to suggest that all services provide this information up front?

[bradleyland]

You will not successfully maintain positive customer relationships by boiling all customer interactions down to questions like "how will that impact your actions [right now]?" Relationships are a string of positive and negative experiences that must be carefully curated.

The decision to remain in a relationship is rarely a singular event (related to a singular experience). You could think of it more as the cumulative result of all relationship experiences. Even the best relationships involve some negative experiences, but the important part is making sure those negative experiences are mitigated as best as possible. Customers will give more leeway to vendors with whom they have a strong NET positive relationship.

There are two important technical points that could have been included to great effect:

1) That they store the encryption scheme with the password record so that they can upgrade their crypto incrementally.

2) That their most recent auth algorithm uses scrypt.

So how do these two points directly impact the mitigation of what is otherwise a negative experience? First up we should look at users who will understand what points 1 & 2 mean. These users will respond positively to these items, because it changes the conversation from "Scribd just got h4x'd" to "Hey, at least they had good crypto in place."

The next tier of users will come along, read these comments, and feel more confident that the community of knowledgable people around them are feeling OK about this, so they should too.

As to the question of, "wouldn't it be better to suggest that all services provide this information up front?" I would say yes, it would. This action is not mutually exclusive of including technical details in this communication though.

[SkyMarshal]

>Now that you know they are using scrypt, how will that impact your actions?

For one, I'm much less annoyed/pissed off at them now that I know they use scrypt. I'm not about to cancel my account and never use them again. And I'm not freaking out about whether my email and password have been added to a botnet cracking script running against every other website out there.

I've gotten so accustomed to hearing of companies using MD5 + salt and thinking that's secure, that is a pleasant surprise to find one using bcrypt, and downright mindblowing to find one using scrypt. Yes, my expectations are low.

>wouldn't it be better to suggest that all services provide this information up front?

Yes, absolutely.

[shabble]

If I'm understanding kpumuk's comment elsewhere in the thread[1], if you got notified/test positive on their check page[2], then you are at risk if you've reused those credentials, since they were grandfathered hashes with weak protection.

> [...] but small amount of account records have had passwords encrypted with outdated algorithm (basically SHA1 + salt), so we preemptively reset their passwords and sent out emails to all affected users.

> This is how we define "compromised" - people which had their passwords hash with old algorithm, which is relatively easy to crack.

I came up positive on the check, which does make sense since i signed up a long time ago and don't often/ever sign in generally, so they wouldn't have had the opportunity to upgrade my hash after moving to better schemes.

Happily it was a 1-tiem/throwaway password though, but bit scary that it's the first list (that I'm aware of) I'm actually on.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5493536

[2] http://www.scribd.com/password/check