How we discovered a database leak in one of the biggest Swiss hosting providers

they don't care to run a business only in german at first, we are in Swiss they should provide three languages. If they fail this, they fail everything. The only serious provider in Swiss is Infomaniak.

:s i can't even get my mysql to get me to be allowed to login root without password >.that besides pitching their own product for an issue any similar natured scan would pick up i'd say it smells like marketing department at work more than chinese hackers or shitty service provider.... >.>

i doubt they would have left a passwordless root on their mysql, or didnt they check the initial setup they were given by the provider before taking it in use?

Indeed. Like they say, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

However how do you go about picking a new provider? How do you know that anyone else is any better?

Email validation regexes are so annoying. Everyone ought to just use .+@.+ as their validation regex and not be more strict than that.

Beyond that just queue and try to deliver the email. Tell the user than an email should arrive shortly and that if it doesn’t they should check their spam folder and that they should check that they gave the correct email address. When you say this you repeat the email address that the user gave you (escaped for XSS of course).

I think some people “validate” against a strict pattern to keep their users from mistyping, but really there are so many ways to make a typo and still match those regexes that IMO it’s pointless to use a complicated regex and 80% of the times those regexes end up rejecting actually valid (though unusual) email addresses.

I think for a lot of developers the reason they do this is that they’ve learned that they should validate data and so they decide to validate email and to do so they either copy-paste some random-ass regex off the internet or they write their own broken regexes.

All your regex should do is to ensure that there is an @ in the address and that there is something before and something after. This keeps people from mistakenly entering say for example their phone number because they didn’t read what the field was for.

To prevent people from making your machine send your emails where it should not, such as to root@localhost of your server or elsewhere on your local network (don’t know why anyone would and also it wouldn’t be a big issue, just a tiny bit annoying), is a server configuration concern. Specifically, a concern of configuration of the email server software and of your firewalls.

User presses sign up -> Send then to registration form, they fill in their details which you validate lightly client side, they submit -> You validate lightly server-side and either send them back to the form or on to the next step -> You tell them “Thank you, your registration is now complete. An email should arrive in your inbox shortly. If it does not, please check your spam folder and also control that you entered your email address correctly. The email address you gave us was somebody@example.com.”

Moral of the story. For my sake:

Check the access logs.

Regularly.