I have a few of these so I'll do a series.
(1 of 3) Public privates

We had a content manager that created a content type called "news item" on a Drupal site. There where two file fields on there. One called "attachments" and the other called "private attachments". The "private attachments" are only for members to see and may contain sensitive data. It was set to go trough Drupals security (instead of being directly hosted by the webserver) but because the permissions on the news items type where completely public everybody had access. So basically it was a slow public file field.

This might be attibuted to ow well Drupal is confusing. Howerver weeks earlier that same CM created a "private article". This actually had permissions on the content type correctly but had a file field that was set to public. So when a member posted the URL to a sensitive file trough unsafe means it got indexed by google and for all to read. When that happend I explained in detail how the system worked and documented it. It was even a website checklist item.

We had two very embarrassing data leaks :-(