Questions like these are not unreasonable for a customer to ask a service provider with respect to identity management and protection of that customer’s proprietary and confidential information.

With respect to the first question “Exactly which employees have the ability to alter recovery email settings.” Not being able to have a prepared answer for this question suggests that you don’t have a formal policy or standard procedure around role based capabilities in your operation.

The second question is an extension of the first.

“In what fashion do you audit and track the activities of these employees?” Not being able to answer that question suggests that you don’t have an auditing process around employee actions with respect to account changes.

“What training are these employees given to avoid social engineering?” Not being able to answer this question suggests that you don’t have such training in place.

“What’s the escalation process for non-no-brainer reset situations?” If your processes are written down and staff are trained in them, a very simple description here would not create a security’s risk of any kind. Not doing so suggests that the process is not formally specified or is quite ad hoc.

“Are the support people who are enabled and entitled to lose the tickets incentivized to close the tickets as soon as possible?” It seems that your internal security posture would make that clear, and it is unclear how stating that correctness is more important than speed in user account modification poses a security risk.

I’ll pause here and summarize. Answering any of these questions is not going to pose a security risk unless such answers expose to your users reasonable measures that you are not taking or haven’t thought of.

Today, that role is granted to a much more limited set of senior security staff (currently 3 people). Regular support staff can not alter security-sensitive details about accounts. If your account is owned by someone else (e.g. family or business, or part of a resold package) then they can still alter recovery options, as they own the account.

In 2016 before we had automated account recovery, lost password was in the top 3 categories of ticket every single week! Every member of the support team dealt with multiple account-loss tickets per day, both forgotten password or stolen account.

Stolen account losses are way down now we have app passwords, we often only have to block a single app password and notify the user rather than locking the entire account. Forgotten passwords have not reduced, but most people are able to recover using the automated tooling.

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In what fashion do we audit and track? A few ways - we log every API call at the lowest level. We log each override when the support person accesses user accounts against the ticket that they come in through, so we can see why they were accessing that user.

We could always do with better tooling to introspect logs, but the data is all captured and can be followed through after the fact. Support staff have no way to wipe their audit trail.

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Training - in 2016 we didn't have much formal training for our support staff - they learned on the job from each other. We are very aware that this was a failing at that time.

We have more training now. We did a lot of work at unifying our support teams across the FastMail and Pobox/Listbox family throughout 2017, and that led to better training and induction materials, as well as better internal reference material for support staff to use.

Early in the induction process for all new support staff is a description of how social engineering works and a warning that urgency is often used in social engineering attempts, so when in doubt, slow down and get a second opinion (which leads to complaints about slow support, but that's the tradeoff here.)

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Escalation process - as mentioned earlier, if you had 2fa enabled then it has always gone straight to the senior security team, which is based in Melbourne and consists of our most experienced and trusted people. Neil (author of the blog post this HN refers to) is of course one of these people.

With lost passwords no longer a highly common support request, all support tickets requesting manual account recovery are escalated to our senior team for review.

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Support people have no incentive to close tickets quickly. Absolutely. That is a bad metric, and it's not a metric we have ever used.

Time to first response and time to followup responses are tracked, but there's no incentive to close tickets.

This answer is a no brainer and I should have answered it in the first response - sorry. I was still rushing through initial responses at that time, and there were too many points in that post to think about them all at once and still respond quickly. The real-time nature of this hacker-news medium encourages fast answers above complete answers. I hope this longer response helps clear up remaining questions, at least to those who see it!

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There's another blog post coming soon about the account recovery system in particular, which addresses exactly how we've minimising human involvement in recovery decisions while not excessively punishing real human frailty amongst our customers.

Can I just clarify some things for peace of mind?

1) When you say regular support staff cannot alter security-sensitive details. How is that done? Do they only perform changes through a limited set of UI?

2) When you say if 2fa is enabled it goes to senior security team, is that an automated process such that support staff don't see that ticket at all? The support ticket interface doesn't seem to have anything that helps to automatically route password reset requests.

3) Was the security incident involving ghouse through support tickets?

4) Do the senior security team have direct data access? i.e. do they also change things through a UI or do they have capability to directly change data?

Thanks

The UI given to support staff doesn't have the ability to update security credentials for users because they no longer have the "can update security credentials" role like they did in 2016. I don't even have it any more.

2) front line support still see all the tickets first, and they route them as appropriate. Sure this takes longer, we don't have 24 hour coverage of senior security staff (not entirely true, we have 24 hour coverage for emergencies. Somebody forgetting their password is not an emergency in this context)

3) the security incident involving ghouse was entirely via support tickets. His description was accurate, front line support send the pro-forma "we need a bunch of these details", got back some pretty half-arsed details that didn't meet the bar of what was supposed to be provided, and helpfully made the change despite our policy. The helpfulness of humans is a major bug with any security system, and this particular human tried to be too helpful.

4) The senior security team also use a UI. Operationally, they all have the ability to write code that directly changes things under the hood, but that code also has an audit trail and goes through review. It's always quicker and easier to use the UI, so that's what they do.

The UI is not just available to those three people, it's also available to anybody who has a multi-user account and needs to administer their own users. It's still a standard part of our system, just restricted in who can use it at an "any arbitrary Fastmail customer" level.

I would like FM to provide something akin to Google's advanced protection program. Those of us who are careful not to lose our login credentials should not have to suffer a weak recovery process for the convenience of those who do. I personally would rather opt my account into a stronger recovery process even if I can't access my account for several days or a week or more.

Check out the longer response here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15859024

Is it possible under any set of circumstances for your human employees to alter accounts? If the automated system fails, are accountholders out of luck?

In some cases we haven't had sufficient information on the account to ever verify that account's owner, and they never got their account back. Some users refuse to give us enough information to allow us to later positively identify them - so yes, those people will be out of luck if they lose their credentials.

I respect that, as CEO, you're genuinely responding to your customers in this thread instead of fobbing it off to someone else.

Hopefully, this can all be explained, resolved, and /or remedied in good time.

But I've started to think about moving back to Chrome for "high security mail".

My private mail is pretty bland and uninteresting, so I don't care too much about not using GMail there, but for my Apple account, Google account, Microsoft account etc. it might be a good idea to compartmentalize those "high value" things from everyday mail and go to GMail with the Advanced Protection Program (so no access from smartphone or iPad, I guess).

And looking at their web site I've learned that GSuite Business is affordable and allows adding domains hosted elsewhere. Good.

What do people think about this?

But then the next step: what about losing my domain? My registrar is a reputable German domain hoster, but certainly no Google. On the other hand, Google doesn't register domains, but has "domain partners" like "domaindiscount24" (that I've never heard of before), so I guess not much to win there.

How many engineering employees does Fastmail even have? How much better would each of them have to be than one of the best-paying security teams in the entire industry for them to match up?

I could go on, but to me, you don't really even have to think hard about this.

Does that make the claims that Protonmail is more secure than Gmail false? - https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-vs-gmail-security/

${All the things I said previously}. And, Google Mail is one of their flagship products.

Most of what is on that ProtonMail page is nonsensical. The claim that is relevant to the discussion here --- that ProtonMail has a "smaller attack surface" and is thus structurally more secure than Google Mail --- assumes significant facts not in evidence.

See downthread for my response to the claim that using a mail services outside the US somehow insulates you from NSA snooping.

But I think they're compromised by those same business models. Google wants to provide intelligence, and probably more important to them, marketing data. This requires that the consumer is an open book to them, and their business decisions incorporate that. Up until recently, they were actively scanning email for marketing insights. In addition, Google's operating complexity, both business and technical, increases the opportunity for failure. And their other business objectives compromise their security work. That's glaringly apparent for their Android platform. There's more surface. And in a Google world, the email account grants direct access to everything — location data, purchasing history, passwords, documents... everything.

For another dedicated email provider, what they have to protect is also simpler. There are fewer moving parts. There's less to protect, which means that there don't need to be as many engineers. That means a careful and well thought out email provider /can/ be as secure, by carefully limiting their exposure, doing one thing, and doing it well.

There's something to be said for careful application of open standards and open source software, a smaller and more responsive team, and not building a massive single point of failure. I am a current Fastmail customer, and hope to remain, depending on the outcome of this review.

Err... This could of been said about Apple Inc a few weeks ago then they go and have the root password issue.

Google were previously reading our emails for Ad purposes and some of their employees are still able to read our Emails, their privacy policy also indictates they will hand over our emails if requested by law enforcement which suggests it's weaker than protonmail.com end-to-end encryption:

> All emails are secured automatically with end-to-end encryption. This means even we cannot decrypt and read your emails. As a result, your encrypted emails cannot be shared with third parties.

If this is the case, how is Google being held as the Gold Standard?

A lot of this comes down to your threat model. If you are most worried about

Unless your threat model is "The NSA gives my hosting provider a court order" or "an employee of my hosting provider goes rogue", its pretty clear that GMail is categorically the best option. And in those two cases, its not clear that there are significantly better options.

[0]: https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/

[1]:https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/24/what-to-do-about-those-gov...

I get and am not questioning that. It's just that your curiosity doesn't seem to have motivated you to do a first pass of, I don't want to call it 'research', but just basic poking around on the topic. You want links and info from some dude on the internet because what he says contradicts stuff you know from... something a vendor said about their product.

It's a totally sensible question but it's not some particularly arcane mystery to dig into. In tptacek's case, in a jiffy, you can bring up the 60-odd comments of his that mention 'Gmail' and get a reasonable idea of what he thinks of it and why. And if you think he's got it wrong, you can say, hey, tptacek, I think you're full of poop when you said [...]. And then maybe you can hash it out and one or both of you will learn something. But 'Citation, please', especially on trivially searchable topics mostly says 'I'm kind of curious, but I don't really care'. The person you're asking probably isn't going to care either.

If all we have are the same claim being repeated with the only way to learn about what makes Gmail the most secure email provider is having to trawl through 1000's of comments. It means Gmail is always going to perceived as more secure even when they may not be, because relatively no-one is going to trawl through 1000's of comments to make an informed assessment otherwise.

60ish is not 1000s. 69ish if you add the 9 about Protonmail. The guy posts on HN so much you can fairly safely go to https://hn.algolia.com and type author:tptacek [topic of interest] and find out what he thinks about it. If there was, inexplicably, a comic universe about HN mutants, he'd be The Citation.

This is getting weird. But I'll allow it.