Meta fined $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of passwords in plaintext
therecord.mediaEuropean regulators fined Meta for an engineering mistake that the social media giant first reported in 2019.
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Riiight, like that’s any better. Jokes aside, it’s hard to imagine what kind of “mistake” results in storing plain text instead of hashing, unless the mistake was in choosing whoever made the security assessment
Christ, the hell I would’ve gotten, in the 90’s, if I’d done something like this.
There was a previous article on this with more explanation that I’m struggling to find.
The gist was that they do hash all passwords stored, the problem was that there was a mistake made with the internal tool they use to do that hashing which led to the passwords inadvertently going into some log system.
“mistake”
I call BS. The reviews I’ve gone through for trivial stuff would’ve exposed this.
This was intentional.
Never assume malice when something can be explained by stupidity
I generally agree.
But any decent code review process would’ve exposed this, or at least a data surveillance system that checks this stuff. I’ve received a few notifications about my logs storing inappropriate data, as a result of a scanning system.
Some manager knew about this during a code review, and signed off on the risk because it was only in-house.
Yeah, cause trivial systems are a lot easier to parse and review. At a base level that’s nonsense logic.
My point being the extensiveness of a review process.
The more important a system, the more people it impacts, etc, the more extensive the review process.
Someone chose to ignore this risk. That’s intentional.
You quite frankly, don’t know what happened and if you’re confident it’s intentional, all that says is that you’re a grump who likes to complain.
A mistake doesn’t mean it’s an accident. A mistake means they made the wrong choice.
Hanlon’s Razor revised: Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, except where there is an established pattern of malice.
Then incompetence at a level that’s incomprehensible.
A code review certainly exposed this, and some manager signed off on the risk.
Again, changes I make are trivial in comparison, and our code/risk reviews would’ve exposed this in no time.
Makes sense now, thank you