Live data from Hacker News

Stupid security things

troyhunt.com

11–20 of 161 posts

Re: Stupid security things

#11
post #7

Programmer (not me!) manually iterates over user file (passwords plain text natch). If he finds a matching username (format is enforced so dead easy to guess). He sets the auth cookie. THEN he goes looking for the password. You don't have to enter any password. At that point, just hit the back button a couple of times and refresh and BING! You can impersonate anybody on the system. Including the admin because guess w…

Blow the whistle anonymously. Let people know which site it is.

Re: Stupid security things

#12
post #6
post #2

The number of webmasters who wanted me to set up ssl to 'secure' their site, while the backend emailed cc info in the clear to the orders dept is larger than I have digits, even the extra adolecent joke ones.

To be honest credit cards are a terrible system in terms of security. Everything to make a charge is on the card and people freely give it out to different websites.

This is one area where PayPal has an advantage, you are pushing the payment rather than the vendor pulling it.

Re: Stupid security things

#13
post #7

Programmer (not me!) manually iterates over user file (passwords plain text natch). If he finds a matching username (format is enforced so dead easy to guess). He sets the auth cookie. THEN he goes looking for the password. You don't have to enter any password. At that point, just hit the back button a couple of times and refresh and BING! You can impersonate anybody on the system. Including the admin because guess w…

>The funnier bit? This site is RSA protected

What does that even mean?

Re: Stupid security things

#15
post #10

@troyhunt: Have you seen the latest leak by Atlassian? I got an email on 4th April, 2017 that reads as follows: Hello, This weekend, our Security Intelligence Team detected an incident affecting HipChat.com that may have resulted in unauthorized access to user account information (including name, email address and hashed password). Atlassian ID is used to manage access to your HipChat.com account and other Atlassian…

No, they couldn't have gotten people's passwords. They could have their passwords _encrypted with a random salt_. Which is, frankly, useless.

Re: Stupid security things

#16
post #13
post #7

Programmer (not me!) manually iterates over user file (passwords plain text natch). If he finds a matching username (format is enforced so dead easy to guess). He sets the auth cookie. THEN he goes looking for the password. You don't have to enter any password. At that point, just hit the back button a couple of times and refresh and BING! You can impersonate anybody on the system. Including the admin because guess w…

>The funnier bit? This site is RSA protected What does that even mean?

You send them your public key in a GET request, and the payload you get back is the encrypted HTML page. Make sure to pick a big enough key size, or you might not see the whole thing...

Re: Stupid security things

#17
post #7

Programmer (not me!) manually iterates over user file (passwords plain text natch). If he finds a matching username (format is enforced so dead easy to guess). He sets the auth cookie. THEN he goes looking for the password. You don't have to enter any password. At that point, just hit the back button a couple of times and refresh and BING! You can impersonate anybody on the system. Including the admin because guess w…

Been there done that. The only thing you didn't mention was that if you do give a wrong password, it calls the logout function. So all tests do work. You can't login with wrong password.

Re: Stupid security things

#18
post #10

@troyhunt: Have you seen the latest leak by Atlassian? I got an email on 4th April, 2017 that reads as follows: Hello, This weekend, our Security Intelligence Team detected an incident affecting HipChat.com that may have resulted in unauthorized access to user account information (including name, email address and hashed password). Atlassian ID is used to manage access to your HipChat.com account and other Atlassian…

No, they couldn't have gotten people's passwords. They could have their passwords _encrypted with a random salt_. Which is, frankly, useless.

They have their email and their ID, added with the knowledge they are compromised. That's enough to build a spoof password reset email and get them to type in an old/new email.

Re: Stupid security things

#19
> and I know for a fact 90% of the sites I personally sign up to online also follow that same process.

This is a totally legit response. After all if something goes wrong they must have followed "best practices". No reasonable person would expect them to do more.

And it's true (if you only consider the needs of the business). This is a solid strategy for getting lawsuits dismissed. I've seen it in physical security too [+]. It only took one investment bank to put badge-checking turnstiles in place and then they all had to do it. That stuck with banks only for a while until one more conventional business did it...and now I was at Twitch the other day and they have it.

Of course who's missing here is the customer. But the customer's needs aren't paramount: the business's are -- and more specifically the manager who has to spend the money on security. If they have put in just enough that they won't get fired when it fucks up, and if they saved money and effort in the process: WIN!

[+] my favorite physical security story is old, so at the end: when leaving Intel's Santa Clara fab in the 1990s you would have to hand over your briefcase for inspection to make sure you weren't leaving with any Intel documents. They didn't care if you had floppy disks. Why? Because this was a defense against shareholder lawsuits and "what else could the guards do?" This is where I learned the explanation above: once anyone in the industry increased plant security they all would have to, which nobody wanted. So LCD was the name of the game.

Post reply on HN