Earlier quoted context omitted.
VPN doesn’t matter here. OP made it clear he was logged into the system first. Presumably all data is blocked until you are logged in. And if you are logged in, IT admin does not care about your IP address when they have your username.
Unless the IT guy was accidentally letting it slip that there was no authorization implemented at all.
Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website
531–540 of 705 posts
Re: Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is prosecuting reporters not, like, definitionally fascist?
Right, you don't need any other supporting information and you don't have to bring political parties into it. If a politician is prosecuting a reporter for embarrassing the state - not for committing a crime - they are a fascist.
Re: Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website
#533After the Affordable Care Act went into effect I signed our company up for our state's marketplace. While browsing our plan options, I noticed the url used a scheme like marketplace.org/employers/341/plans.aspx. Of course, I tried changing the number in the url to 342 to see what happened. To my astonishment, it loaded up the next company's plans, including a list of employee names, ages, plan cost, and SSNs. After I…
How is it a bad response? They want to know what data has been exposed and ensure you delete that data. That's data leak 101. Why would you be defensive about it?
Re: Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website
#534
Orville Redenbacher
Re: Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
We live in a world where everyone thinks they understand computers and have an expectation of security and privacy, but they don't realize how hard it is to build these systems correctly. The best security appears to be invisible to the consumer, but requires a lot of thought by the implementer. This is the same reason why I think most of the general public don't understand how much data social media apps can collect…
> I'm not a mobile developer, but it would be interesting if iOS provided a service that allowed data to never leave the phone I'm not sure I follow. Do you mean the app wouldn't be allowed to send any data over the network? As soon as the app can send any data, it's trivial to hide in there whatever the app wants to send home.
Re: Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website
#536After the Affordable Care Act went into effect I signed our company up for our state's marketplace. While browsing our plan options, I noticed the url used a scheme like marketplace.org/employers/341/plans.aspx. Of course, I tried changing the number in the url to 342 to see what happened. To my astonishment, it loaded up the next company's plans, including a list of employee names, ages, plan cost, and SSNs. After I…
People have gone to jail for incrementing integers in URLs like that (most famously, weev).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev
He's also a neo-Nazi and white supremacist. I do believe in free speech, but some of the things he does seem to take it way too far.
And he famously doxed Kathy Sierra, a female technical writer who created the Head First series. I actually quite like some of the books in the series, and it's incredibly sad to hear incidents like this which actively discourage females in tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra
I suspect there's more to the AT&T incident than just, oh, I found a flaw, let me responsible report this to the relevant parties in responsible disclosure.
Re: Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is 100% the correct analogy.
But this is assuming that the server has more agency than it does. Servers don't have minds and they don't make authorization decisions. This is more like someone giving you key to a filing cabinet in order to retrieve some documents and while you're there you snoop on the ones next to yours. Is this system more trusting of people than it should be? Probably. Does that mean you're allowed to snoop on other people's d…
Re: Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website
#538From the article, it sounds like nothing even remotely questionable was done by the reporter who found the flaw: > "According to the Post-Dispatch, one of its reporters discovered the flaw in a web application allowing the public to search teacher certifications and credentials. No private information was publicly visible, but teacher Social Security numbers were contained in HTML source code of the pages."
Tell me if I'm reading this wrong. I want to be reading this wrong. Is this saying that when you viewed a certain page (which I assume had only one person's SSN visible, or perhaps other teacher information like names), the "invisible" SSNs were just hidden with `display: none` or similar?
Re: Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe he was hoping OP didnt know about VPNs, it's not an uncommon scare tactic to imply being tracked is unavoidable.
Would be ironic since OP caught an exploit that their entire team wasn't smart enough to catch... yet somehow he wouldn't know about something as basic as VPNs?
Re: Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website
#540After the Affordable Care Act went into effect I signed our company up for our state's marketplace. While browsing our plan options, I noticed the url used a scheme like marketplace.org/employers/341/plans.aspx. Of course, I tried changing the number in the url to 342 to see what happened. To my astonishment, it loaded up the next company's plans, including a list of employee names, ages, plan cost, and SSNs. After I…
It is very easy for IT managers to put the blame on "hackers" intruding into the network, instead of assuming they created an insecure system. In many companies this can work.