Quirk? Surely a bug?
It's not a bug if it's the expected behaviour
WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
41–50 of 127 posts
Re: WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
#42They didn’t suffer a breach; they published a market-moving PDF early because they put it on a public WordPress server at a predictable URL with no access control, then acted shocked when someone typed it into a browser. The report dresses this up in solemn language about “pre-publication facilities” and “configuration errors”, but the reality is negligent basics: no authentication, no server-level blocking, blind faith in a plugin they didn’t understand, and not one person running the obvious test of guessing the URL before go-live. Their claim of “independence” just meant running the most sensitive part of their job on an underpowered, misconfigured website while assuming everything else would magically hold together. This wasn’t a cyber incident. It was institutional incompetence wearing a suit.
Re: WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
#43There's a couple of passing mentions of Download Monitor, but also the timeline strongly implies that a specific source was simply guessing the URL of the PDF long before it was uploaded I'm not clear from the doc which of these scenarios is what they're calling the "leak"
https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/OBR_Economic_and_fiscal_outl... 5.pdf Not hard to guess really. Wouldn't they know this was likely and simply choose a less obvious file name?
Turn out, no. Not they would not.
Re: WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it’s getting quite ridiculous now. Labour, for sure, have not done themselves any favours in their first 18 months in charge, but the level of attack and vitriol is exceptional and beyond any reasonable level. It makes me wonder what exactly is driving this.
The fact that they were elected as a 'change' government and have barely done anything that really faces up to the scale of the challenge the country faces? If you're below the age of about 55, then the budget did absolutely nothing for you except put taxes up, and not even to improve services. I appreciate things time but so far the government have enormously walked back their planning reform proposals, which was on…
I don’t disagree with any of that, but the vitriol doesn’t match the disappointment imho. Especially as they’ve done pretty well in other areas.
I realise “it’s the economy, stupid”, but still it feels like outsized outrage.
Re: WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
#45Why are government organisations which handle sensitive information using Wordpress?
This is a reasonable question. I mean yeah it’s supposed to be made public anyway, but evidently there is a non-trivial amount of interest invested in its contents by people who don’t usually qualify when we think of “the public”. Otherwise what would be the big deal?
My guess is that the team responsible for this didn’t anticipate or at worst were not informed of its value to particular groups of people, at least not to a degree that would’ve warranted extra security measures.
Re: WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
#46So is the significance of this news based on what could have leaked if the document was not intended for the public? [1] Or is the significance of this news based on the advantages that players on the market who caught hold of it early will have? Is it only important to civilians relative to their ability to question who may be benefitting from the 40 minute head start that these players might have gained or (for the…
Interestingly, the public discourse in the UK (at least what I have observed, and it was hard not to observe a lot in the last several days) does not focus much (if at all) on the insider trading angle. It's mostly that the chancellor has this important duty to first announce the new budget beofre the Parliament, and if this course of events gets distorted this is very bad for the proper procedure. Now, the sole purpose of OBR is to ensure the proper procedure, so very silly (or "damning") of them to make such a mistake.
At the same time, almost every piece of legislation in recent years has been relentlessly leaked and taken apart way before the official announcement in parliament, so this is a wee bit ridiculous.
Re: WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
#47So is the significance of this news based on what could have leaked if the document was not intended for the public? [1] Or is the significance of this news based on the advantages that players on the market who caught hold of it early will have? Is it only important to civilians relative to their ability to question who may be benefitting from the 40 minute head start that these players might have gained or (for the…
It’s just about incompetence really. The budget is meant to be highly secret. And they accidentally published their report early. Which would let some people benefit from in financially, but it’s also just very embarrassing for a government. Sometimes budgets contain info that is more valuable than this.
Re: WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it’s getting quite ridiculous now. Labour, for sure, have not done themselves any favours in their first 18 months in charge, but the level of attack and vitriol is exceptional and beyond any reasonable level. It makes me wonder what exactly is driving this.
The fact that they were elected as a 'change' government and have barely done anything that really faces up to the scale of the challenge the country faces? If you're below the age of about 55, then the budget did absolutely nothing for you except put taxes up, and not even to improve services. I appreciate things time but so far the government have enormously walked back their planning reform proposals, which was on…
> The fact that they were elected as a 'change' government and have barely done anything that really faces up to the scale of the challenge the country faces?
They have done a lot. But they haven't even stopped the runaway train yet. And the fundamental mistake they have made is not explaining to people clearly enough, during the election campaign, that it would take the first three years just to stop it.
Then you have the absolutely shameful, racist, nihilistic, fact-free intervention of five MPs that the media thinks will run the country in future so they are getting ten times the airtime of anyone else.
Re: WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
#49They didn’t suffer a breach; they published a market-moving PDF early because they put it on a public WordPress server at a predictable URL with no access control, then acted shocked when someone typed it into a browser. The report dresses this up in solemn language about “pre-publication facilities” and “configuration errors”, but the reality is negligent basics: no authentication, no server-level blocking, blind fa…
But but but they ‘have a limited budget’ (repeated multiple times for effect in the article)
Re: WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
#50For those of you not closely following UK politics: the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) mistakenly published their Economic and Fiscal Outlook (EFO) document 40 minutes early, pre-empting the announcements by the Chancellor. This is being treated as an incredibly big deal here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd74v35p77jo
> which it blamed on a "technical error"
It's not a technical error at all!
Technical errors are faults caused by technology, like a software or hardware bug. That's not what happened here. WordPress behaved exactly as it was supposed to.
The true cause is revealed later in the article,
> staff thought they had applied safeguards to prevent early publication, there were two errors in the way in which they were set up
The problem was the staff. It's a human error.