Why not have a game of DevSecOpoly? Doing DevOps and Security right!

OMG, security breach on devRant!!!
My password is shown in clear text near my avatar.

haveibeenpwned: MASSIVE SECURITY BREACH AT COMPANY X, MILLIONS OF RECORDS EXPOSED AND SOLD, YOUR DATA IS AT RISK, please change your password!

Company X website: Hey your password expired! Please change it. Everything's fine, wanna buy premium? The sun is shining. Great day.

Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.

That time when...

He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.

He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.

He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.

He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).

He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).

He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.

He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.

He set up a new email account for each individual online service.

He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).

He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).

He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).

He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.

He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.

He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.

He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.

He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).

He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.

(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).

He ate a sim card.

He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).

He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.

He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).

He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).

He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.

I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.

Ah, I see you studies music in college! Why don't you work in information security!

So at work with the Macs we use, we have some guy come in after hours to service the Macs, and that means the security risk of leaving our passwords on our desks.

Not being a fan of this I tell my boss, he knows it's a risk and despite that he doesn't want this guy coming in while we're here.

Though my main problem is the Mac guy Steve is arrogant and thinks he's a know it all, and with the software I have on the Mac may end up deleting something important, I have git repo and all but I feel off just letting someone touch my computer without me being there.

I tell my boss about the software and stuff he just says contact Steve and tell him about it, to ignore the software and such, I say alright, I write up an email telling him not to touch the software listed and the folders of software documents (again it's all backed up).

No reply, I tell my boss and he says call him, I call him and he hangs up on me on the second ring!

Not sure if he's busy, but I left him a message, asking if he got my email, no reply and it's coming close to the end of the day (going to service Macs in the weekend)

I'm just not going to leave my info because if this guy can't check emails or even get back to someone why should I bother with this bullshit of risking my work.

From all the info I hear about him and my previous rants he's an arrogant prick who loves Macs.

Can't wait to leave this company, pretty sure leaving my password on my desk is a breach of our own security policy, and since 8-9 people are doing it, it's a major risk.

But he's friends with the CEO so apparently it's fuck our own security policy.

Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.

Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.

Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.

It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.

It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.

I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.

"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."

It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.

The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.

In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.

It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.

It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.

These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.

The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.

I’m LOLing at the audacity of one of our vendors.

We contract with a vendor to build and maintain a website. Our network security team noticed there was a security breach of the vendor’s website. Our team saw that malicious users gained access to our Google Search console by completing a challenge that was issued to the vendor’s site.

At first, the vendor tried to convince us that their site wasn’t comprised and it was the Google search Console that was compromised. Nah dude. Our Search Console got compromised via the website you maintain for us. Luckily our network team was able to remove the malicious users from our search console.

That vendor site accepts credit card payments and displays the user’s contact info like address, email, and phone. The vendor uses keys that are tied to our payment gateway. So now my employer is demanding a full incident report from the vendor because their dropping the ball could have compromised our users’ data and we might be responsible for PCI issues.

And the vendor tried to shit on us even more. The vendor also generates vanity urls for our users. My employer decided to temporarily redirect users to our main site (non vendor) because users already received those links and in order to not lose revenue. The vendor’s solution is to build a service that will redirect their vanity urls to our main site. And they wanted to charge us $5000 usd for this. We already pay them $1000 a month already.

WTAF we are not stupid. Our network service team said we could make the argument that they do this without extra charge because it falls in the scope of our contract with them. Our network team also said that we could terminate the contract because the security breach means they didn’t render the service they were contracted to do. Guess it’s time for us to get our lawyer’s take on this.

So now it looks like my stakeholders want me to rebuild all of this in house. I already have a lot on my plate, but I’m going to be open to their requests because we are still in the debrief phase.

So today I found a way to break into any Apple Mac (provided the exploit hasn't been fixed by the owner) and access all private files, as long as I have physical access to it, in less than 5 minutes.

After finding this, a quick Google on the method reveals this has been a workaround for years.

And to think I once praised Apple for their security standards.

Edit: this was done to an in-house Mac that my company own, and had been password locked by a member of staff who had been fired, but held important company documents on the computer. It was in no way a breach of privacy.

why people around me act like dump. i have recently worked with this site, which is written in php.

customer: (yelling) my website is hacked, fix it immediately
me : ok sir, we will restore your site immediately

after finishing talk with customer. i have checked website, there is no sign of website being hacked. i have checked server logs and website for security breach, there is no sign.

me: your website is not hacked, sir. can you please tell me where you have seen hacked page.
customer: look at those pages

after seen that page i facepalmed myself. it's a bug, person who created that page just splitted string without using any multibyte function, so page is showing with corrupted characters. i fixed it and problem solved. i have told about that bug, to the person who created that page.

me: hey you have used this function which is not able to handle multibyte characters, you should use multibyte character functions for that one.
person: every characters are the same. we shouldn't need to handle that way.

he is actually a senior developer. who don't even know the difference between unicode and ascii characters.

Today my fellow @EaZyCode found out a local Hosting Provider has a massive security breach.

He wrote an Plugin for Minecraft with an own file explorer and the ability to execute runtime commands over it.

We discovered that this specific hosting provider stores the ftp passwords one level above the FTP-Root. In FUCKING PLAIN TEXT! AND THE MYSQL PASSWORD TOO! And even more shit is stored there ready to be viewed by intelligent people...

It's one of the fucking biggest Hosting provider Germanys!

But, because EaZyCode has such a great mind and always find such bugs, I give him the title "Providers Endboss" today, he has earned it.

Loving you ❤️

Edit: we used SendMail with runtime commands and sended too many empty Spammails (regret noting)

I am doing some freelance work for a client who is thankfully mindful about security. I found out that they are so strict with their access because they had a huge data breach last year.

Today I was given access to their repo for connecting to their AS400. In the docker file the username and password were included and were the same for dev and prod. They also are performing no sql injection prevention. They are just joining strings together.

"Using MD5" !? What year are we in again?

NOTICE OF DATA BREACH

Dear Yahoo User,
We are writing to inform you about a data security issue that may involve your Yahoo account information. We have taken steps to secure your account and are working closely with law enforcement.
...
What Information Was Involved?

The stolen user account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5)

SELECT * FROM yahoo_user_passwords WHERE powned = null;

// 0 records found

I hate that the company that I work for has every hugging page blocked. I can't even download or use pip. For hug sake, I don't even have a project to work on and you stop me from working on any side projects?

I hope I get a call from the places I've applied for.

Sooo... The ways my coworker fucks me:

Last week I have been working on setting up aWireGuard VPN server... Been trying for 4 FUCKING DAYS, the easiest VPN that has ever existed, 2 commands and that's it, I wasn't able to reach it, I checked every forum, tested every possible solution without success, checking ubuntu firewall but it was inactive... Nothing that should cause this. Why? 2 weeks ago we had a security breach and my coworker added a firewall from the cloud console with basic rules allowing only 3 ports, the port I was communicating with was blocked. He didn't bother to mention that he added an external firewall. And the junior me, not wanting to be a pain in the ass, and since that security breach wasn't my responsibility to fix, I didn't ask too many questions, just read the emails going back and forth and "learning" how to deal with that. Kill me please. Next mont a new guy is joining, we had a "quick meeting" of 30 minutes and he managed to make it 2 hours meeting. So a partner who lacks communication and a partner who talks a lot... Will be fun. And I probably should change my username... Is that even possible? @root?

fellow dev thought he was being clever, hiding his private ssh keys inside image files on a public web server...

Had a client whom was using the staging system on my server as cdn, remote computing, etc... because his prod server was a cheap vhost while the vm was a beast compared to it. I shut it down without telling. I just got a call that his site is now slow a f and full of errors.

I kindly told him that there was a recent security breach called dirty cow. Then I told him that I shut the vm down because it would mean security risk for him since there are no patches available yet and only Power on again with there was work for me to do.

If you want resources pay for them

Windows just activated TPM on my Windows 10 computer on first of february 2024.
The main reason I stuck with Windows 10 was the sole reason of not wanting to upload my hardware-fingerprint to MS.
Well, guess they just got it themselves and now, disabling the TPM comes with a lot of downsides, as it is now holding my certificates hostage...

I just used a contact form of a local webshop. I couldnt enter my email address because it contains a +.

I contacted them to tell them about this issue and the response was it is because of security reasons. Since when is following specs a security breach? Unless their system is one leak I don't see how its possible.

Am I wrong or did they either lie or have a leak in their system?

So I just started using the app called Rmabox and it seems pretty useful. Actually I am ranting using the same app. Keeps all my social profiles at one place. But I am concerned about my privacy as well. Is it safe to use such apps which help you to manage all your social accounts at one place? Will that not create a single point of security breach?

The NPC has stated that the personal data of atleast 2000 people was leaked after the attacks on the websites of the philippinian goverment on april 1, the data contains; names,adresses,passwords and school data.

Over 7 administrators of schools, universities and other goverment structures have been called out for not reporting on the leakage of personal info on public facebook groups and violaton of the NPC in under 72 hours.

The representatives of the next structures stood before the comission on the 23 and 24 of april

- Taguig City University

- Department of Education offices in Bacoor City and Calamba City

- the Province of Bulacan

- Philippine Carabao Center

- Republic Central Colleges in Angeles City

- Laguna State Polytechnic University

The agency has reported that none of the organisations had notified about the personal info leakage yet.

This is a good reminder that you should inform about security/personal info breaches everyone that might be related to it as soon as possible, even if it seems unecessary.

Great, passwords compromised, time to change all account details everywhere, fun and games....

One of our senior colleagues in my last project at TCS had brought a pen drive with him, not sure why! He worked on a client system, which he believed was not monitored by TCS. So what he did was, he plugged in the pen drive in his computer and tried to copy some files from his pen drive to the computer. However, he wasn’t able to copy the files.

We weren’t aware of this until our project manager, who sits at the farthest end of the ODC shouted at the top of his voice, calling out his name. In front of the entire ODC, he was scolded since the HR team had called the manager informing that the machine assigned under this employee’s name has detected a security breach.

He had to explain the reason; where he said he wanted to copy some codes that he had to office machine in order to reduce his manual effort, which was probably very silly of him! For the next few days I hardly saw him inside the ODC, probably had to visit people to show cause or other things and was harrassed by our manager, insulted every time he passed by him.

He was not suspended although, maybe the manager or someone else saved him, although normally such violations would have seen him terminated.

The fellow one (hackers) should leave out dev accounts , BFAM we are.:D