It's been a few days now since the Utopian hack, which occurred between 3rd and 4th of May.
As Utopian very openly reported, it was attack on their main production server (which was erased) and the CDN (erased as well).
The uglier part for the Steemians who use Utopian came from the fact the hacker got access to SteemConnect tokens which were stored on the attacked server to allow for a seamless functionality of the Utopian site, without constantly asking for permissions to act on the behalf on their users.
These tokens the hacker enter into possession were used to cast both upvotes and downvotes in an apparently random sequence (apart for downvotes which seemed to target haejin mostly). Until tokens were revoked. That's the only thing the hacker could do with these tokens, he (or she, why not?!) couldn't move funds, vote/unvote witnesses, get access or change to the private keys.
The first time I've seen the news it was presented in a way to think SteemConnect had an issue and we should revoke the authorizations for all tokens. The step was necessary and urgent until more information became available, because you never know the extend of damage or the source of it. So I revoked all my SteemConnect tokens as well at the time.
As it turned out, the attack was on the Utopian server itself, and not an issue with SteemConnect. The question is: is there a way to implement the same seamless experience without storing SteemConnect tokens on Utopian server and thus potentially exposing them to future attacks? The same question extends to any other site/ tool/service which possibly take the same approach.
Although I haven't re-authorized the apps where I previously had active SteemConnect tokens yet, I will. The successful hack was on a server which contained centralized information, rather than on a blockchain where such a stunt would be close to impossible and SteemConnect has no blame in this matter.
Furthermore, even though on occasions SteemConnect asks for owner or active keys, these keys are never stored on the server. Therefore, any potential breach (like the one Utopian experienced), can only affect the operations permitted by a lower-ranked key such as the posting or memo key (posting, commenting and upvoting, downvoting posts or comments).
Remember! Always enter the lowest-ranked private key possible!
In order, from the highest to the lowest-ranked private keys, they are:
- owner/master (never use this key unless you want to change your private keys or you want to request to recover your account in case it was hacked!)
- active key
- posting key
- memo key (use this key whenever possible, it has no practical use in Steem right now, other than identifying your account on the blockchain! If someone gets access to it, they can't practically do anything on your account, not even posting and upvoting/downvoting! That doesn't mean you should make it public, there's a reason it's called "private key")