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Re:Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in... by gwbas1c on Thursday March 21, 2019 @03:05PM (#19456126)
Explicitly logging a password is one of those practices that doesn't sit on the backlog.

It's probably a bit more complicated than that. Usually the things that I encounter have to do with how HTTP requests are logged.

For example, putting sensitive information in a URL that's loaded over HTTPS is considered insecure because many companies have policies where they log every URL that their employees visit. (Think of a password reset link.)

A lot of inexperienced programmers don't realize this, because they don't realize that you can man-in-the-middle yourself, and that most corporate computers come preconfigured to allow the employer to man-in-the-middle everyone.

So, if a password reset link never expires, it means that some guy in IT can own an account that was reset on a corporate computer.

(This, basically, is how they catch people viewing porn on their work computers.)

Anyway, my point is that the problem is probably something where a junior programmer transmitted a password in a way that they didn't realize was being logged.

Re:Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in... by Kalium on Friday March 22, 2019 @09:49AM (#19462468)
> Explicitly logging a password is one of those practices that doesn't sit on the backlog.

If that is your experience, then that's a truly wonderful thing.

Might it be possible that at many companies, teams with deadlines to hit will tend to prioritize feature work over details like this? Perhaps especially so when teams are not rewarded for fixing vulnerabilities and are punished for not meeting deadlines? Particularly when the actual bug at hand is that the full contents of a POST are being logged, and a PM might not read the ticket enough to understand that this includes a password...

Again, you're completely right in every way about what should happen. It just could be possible that this could reflect something other than all experiences all software engineers have had.

Re:Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in... by sqldba on Friday March 22, 2019 @02:10AM (#19459992)
> Explicitly logging a password is one of those practices that doesn't sit on the backlog.

For you maybe. For Facebook obviously it's different.

Re:Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in... by Thorrez on Friday March 22, 2019 @02:18AM (#19460027)
>For Facebook obviously it's different.

What evidence do you have for that? Nowhere in the article does it say facebook "explicity logged" passwords. The logging likely happened through some unintended and roundabout process that is far from explicit.

Re:Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in... by smueller1234 on Friday March 22, 2019 @04:05AM (#19460398)
Why would this be down voted?

I think incompetence over malice is almost certainly the right answer here.

Re:Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in... by 908087 on Friday March 22, 2019 @11:47AM (#19463683)
How many times does a company of Facebook's size get to say "oopsie, we're sorry" before you'll stop giving them to benefit of the doubt? I see this as a malicious disregard for the security and privacy of their users, and their history aligns with that view.
Re:Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in... by smueller1234 on Friday March 22, 2019 @05:10PM (#19467006)
That's a valid point of view, of course. The failure is certainly well beneath what one should expect Facebook.

Nonetheless, I stick to incompetence over malice. There's just so much more of the former in the world than the latter!

Re:Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in... by e7ebanlv on Friday March 22, 2019 @12:54AM (#19459728)
Back when I was sysadmin, I catched everyone watching porn by suddenly walking into their offices, but I'm sure your method is better.