Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

Me: how's your password security?

Them: of course we value security very highly, our passwords are all hashed before being stored.

Me: what hashing algorithm?

Them: oh we hash it with sha and then place that in a table indexed by the password.

Indexed. By. The fucking. Password.

I was reviewing one dev's work. It was in PHP. He used MD5 for password hashing. I told him to use to password_hash function as MD5 is not secure...

He said no we can't get a password from MD5 hashed string. It's one way hashing...

So I asked him to take couple of passwords from the users table and try to decode those in any online MD5 decoder and call me after that if he still thinks MD5 is secure.

I have not got any call from him since.

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

I was registering for a website, and on a whim, I used this as my username:
null'); PRINT('Hello');--

And sure enough, the login system went down. The next day it was still down, so I went to Twitter to tell the people running the site that this was why, but to my surprise, I see them saying they had been hacked.
Based on the timing, I'm pretty sure they're referring to this, but they are saying user info was stolen. *facepalm*
They later said they stored passwords salted with a fixed salt and hashed with fucking md5, at which point I was glad not to have done any more business with them.

How incompetent can these fucking people be?!

So Facebook announced a New Feature which lets you upload nudes which get hashed and on a Blacklist so they can't be uploaded to facebook. And in Order to prevent abuse, a human Reviews the pictures. Genius idea

Not exactly a security bug, but there was a company that made a Django app for some internal work and later open sourced it. I was browsing through the code and I saw that the config file had an IP address and a hashed password for the database credentials

When I tried to use them, I was able to login directly to their read replica RDBMS, I had access to all their customer data (including phones & home addresses)
Being the saint I am, I informed them of the ignorance made by their developer and was presented with some cool swag.

!security

(Less a rant; more just annoyance)

The codebase at work has a public-facing admin login page. It isn't linked anywhere, so you must know the url to log in. It doesn't rate-limit you, or prevent attempts after `n` failures.

The passwords aren't stored in cleartext, thankfully. But reality isn't too much better: they're salted with an arbitrary string and MD5'd. The salt is pretty easy to guess. It's literally the company name + "Admin" 🙄

Admin passwords are also stored (hashed) in the seeds.rb file; fortunately on a private repo. (Depressingly, the database creds are stored in plain text in their own config file, but that's another project for another day.)

I'm going to rip out all of the authentication cruft and replace it with a proper bcrypt approach, temporary lockouts, rate limiting, and maybe with some clientside hashing, too, for added transport security.

But it's friday, so I must unfortunately wait. :<

Just wanted to say cheers to all those coders among you who make sure their login is encrypted, their passwords are hashed and salted, their codes are tested and their forms are code injection safe.

No client will understand what you did, so take my props for it! After all, its our responsibility to make sure software is secure. That's all :)

Database with hashed content looks crazy ;D

If($password = $password2) {
//login
}

Keep in mind that password is the salted and hashed input and password2 is the Salter and hashed pw in the database...

Who needs passwords am I right?

Found that out that one of our company's internal API (I hope it's only internal) is exposing some personal data. After finally getting the right people involved they said they'd fix it 'immediately'.

5 days later I check and now there is more personal data exposed...which includes personal security questions and the hashed answers to said questions.

And of course they are using a secure hashing mechanism...right? Wrong. md5, no salt

Sigh...

Client stores all user accounts in a publicly accessible google spreadsheet in case the user forgets their login. It includes user name, plain text password, and just in case, the hashed password....

Massive payment gateway (not gonna say names) with more then 10k transactions / hour telling md5 is one of most secure encryptions they have. Only to made worse by the fact that they send the key and hashed key in the same request.

I am advising all our clients to change payment gateway asap if they use this one.

A few years ago I found a public AWS S3 bucket owned by a fortune 500 company containing a database dump backup with all of their users unsalted md5 hashed passwords.

I didn't report it because I don't want to get sued or charged. I don't know whether it's still public or not.

I saved passwords to db hashed to SHA-1 with no salt... I left that company but I'm sure that application is still actively used today.

"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)

Just found out that a big hosting provider saves a user's SQL and FTP password in a plain text file just at the parent folder of the normally accessible ftproot.
Using some linux commands you can
cat ../mysql_pw
cat ../ftp_password.txt
IT'S NOT EVEN ENCRYPTED OR HASHED
(This is tested on a minecraft server, would also work on other services)

It's a tie between 3 things for me.

1. md5 hashed passwords
2. post variable concatenated into sql with no checks
3. admin login over http

sad thing is that all 3 was one website I redid a few years ago

Sometimes lack of confidence in one area reveals oversight cockyness in stronger areas:

Set up a simple login system from Unity engine to php to mysql db, using android device ID as the login id. Set up database column to accept 32 length varchar for MD5 hashed strings, as I knew the method I was getting the android device ID was automatically being hashed that way and more or less was what I wanted anyway.

Spend 2 days wondering why it would insert the logins with 0 issue, but could never retrieve them. Due to lack of web development and PHP skills, I assumed I was screwing up the handling of mysqli_num_rows() (to check whether I was inserting or selecting in the query) or simply screwing up my SQL queries.

Rewrite the code a few times, even went back to a method I had used in the past.

Today it dawned on me that my testing machines deviceID had been getting trimmed to the 32 character limit. Turns out I didn't account for my workstations device ID to be automatically hashed like the android device id is.

For 2 days I was obtaining and sending a 40 character string to a 32 character limit varchar and blaming my lack of PHP skills........

Back to my niche I go!

Who would be interested in reviewing an old peice of Python code I wrote..? It's a few years old, and it uses basic procedual generation to cypher text (entry, or ASCII files) using a hashed password. It's a command line tool.

I used to brag about how "secure" it was, and now I'm curious if it is secure or not.

I plan on picking it back up and open-sourcing it, but I want to know what problems might be wrong with it now.

"Nah we can't implemented that feature cause our urls are hashed". Hmm, that looks like a base64 string. Decode. Profit!

I took Database System Class and Courses in University, and told to store the password using its hash and don't store it in plain text; it is at least a standard.

today i just resetting my gmail password since i forgot the password. and i wonder by how google forgot password mechanism work.

for example i register the password with:
'xxxfalconxxx'
and then change it to:
'youarebaboon123'

sometimes later i forgot both password, and google asked for the last password i remember; and i only remember part of it so i entered:
'falcon'

and this is right, so i can continue the forgot password mechanism. how could you check the hashed text of 'falcon' is the subset of hash text 'xxxfalconxxx' ?

If I were to change all my passwords into hashes (so take a random word and hash it, ex 'table') and then use those on various websites, would people ever guess that my password is _an actual hash_ rather than a password in hashed form if they were to see it? Would such a meta-hash be safer if 'hackers' were to find it unencrypted?

Best: take a job as a data analyst. 1 year later, re-write and re-deploy the entire backend following correct security concentions and well-hashed-out data models.

Worst: attempt to backup a hard drive using dd, just to accidentally brick the laptop (because it had some security layer the school put to prevent just that)

Bestest: use knowledge acquired at my "best" story to nuke windows on bricked laptop. Then extract the leftover data using dd and a series of recovery tools.

How hard can it be to sort content stored in a relational database by a custom meta parameter and restrict the results to a certain language using a very popular content management system in 2023?

After wasting several hours trying to get my head around reference documents, 20 years of anecdotal StackExchange + WordPress.org discussion and ACF + Polylang support, and trying to debug my code, I will now either write my own SQL query or put the meta query results in a hashed object to sort it using my own PHP code.

What time is it now? 2003?

One of our clients old CMS was completely hand written, allowed execution of PHP files in the uploads directory with an uploader that was publicly accessible, and the "security" was MD5 hashed passwords. Oh and the username/password for the admin user was password.

It's 4:00 AM here, and I decided to go through my old project where I had put my maximum effort, it is a PHP Project, sadly not in production, I had built it from scratch, the sad part is password hashing, I had to go through 3 different files before the actual password is getting hashed, password_hash($pass, PASSWORD_BCRYPT), I am feeling so stupid right now I can't even describe in words, ok bye

I've seen a lot of buzz around the EU's GDPR and since I don't live there I'm wondering if it applies only if you store personal data and should it count if it's hashed for example?🤔

Let's say you hash a client's IP, it's not technically his data you've irreversibly transformed it into something else, like a computation.

For example let's say he provides you with a number and you multiply it by another and store the result, let's say 2 x 2 = 4, Is the 4 his data or yours?

Also I'm really interested in the general opinion of ranters about article 13.

so i'm about to deploy admin application which doesn't have admins passwords hashed

after asking him, wtf dude?
he replied, no worries mate

fml

Last year my class had a group project, we had to make a site to allow users to book to their favourite clinic, it was in php, I dislike php, if it were for me, I would have developed the backend in python, but I was the only one to know how to do it in my class...
I asked if they cyphered the passwords, they laughed at me, then the presentation day arrived...
The moron who started to make fun of me said "The password is cyphered, it's super secure", then he showed the db, every password but one was clear, the one I put in my form was hashed, the others were readable by anyone, when I saw the teacher's face I started laughing so hard lol

Jeesh! In the last 12 months I've had a lot of emails from the different services I've used that they've been compromised and a database of emails and hashed passwords have been exposed 😒

Token for App -> backend authentication is generated one time when the user signs up. Sniff it once and you've got access to the user account forever.

Passwords are hashed with one round of SHA1, no salt.

Everything including login data is sent over plain HTTP.

Luckily I got permission to fix that mess

So I start up the Windows Upgrade Assistant to upgrade my Windows 10 to the anniversary edition and it shows me that I'm running version 10240 and I can upgrade to the latest version 14xxx.

So I hit upgrade now, wait for 10 minutes for the update to be downloaded and another 10 minutes for the update to be installed. Then it does the customary reboot after update.

So now I assume that I'm running the anniversary edition of Windows 10 but it shows that I'm still running 10240.

WTF was the upgrade assistant doing in those 20 odd minutes. And now it does it in an infinite loop. Is Microsoft trying to explain me what an Infinite loop looks like practically.

There were probably odd bits and peices before this, but the first one I did with a friend must have been a "password cracker" to attempt to crack MD5 hashed passwords. Was simple as anything, but worked quite effectively.

I think i came up with the ultimate captcha. A gif that displays four numbers, one by one in current position. There's always one number displayed. I do not think that AI can recognize it without some nasty adjustments while it's very clear for humans. A while ago I had to do a captcha with six questions and failed it a few times. Wtf.

The site I'm working on will have this captcha soon. I make a microservice in C that will create a captcha equal to the last url parameter, the four digit number. By giving the number yourself as parameter you know what to validate with later at post. I probably include the answer hashed with some salt in a hidden field to compare answer with so it works if you have two tabs open

Relatively often the OpenLDAP server (slapd) behaves a bit strange.

While it is little bit slow (I didn't do a benchmark but Active Directory seemed to be a bit faster but has other quirks is Windows only) with a small amount of users it's fine. slapd is the reference implementation of the LDAP protocol and I didn't expect it to be much better.

Some years ago slapd migrated to a different configuration style - instead of a configuration file and a required restart after every change made, it now uses an additional database for "live" configuration which also allows the deployment of multiple servers with the same configuration (I guess this is nice for larger setups). Many documentations online do not reflect the new configuration and so using the new configuration style requires some knowledge of LDAP itself.
It is possible to revert to the old file based method but the possibility might be removed by any future version - and restarts may take a little bit longer. So I guess, don't do that?

To access the configuration over the network (only using the command line on the server to edit the configuration is sometimes a bit... annoying) an additional internal user has to be created in the configuration database (while working on the local machine as root you are authenticated over a unix domain socket). I mean, I had to creat an administration user during the installation of the service but apparently this only for the main database...

The password in the configuration can be hashed as usual - but strangely it does only accept hashes of some passwords (a hashed version of "123456" is accepted but not hashes of different password, I mean what the...?) so I have to use a single plaintext password... (secure password hashing works for normal user and normal admin accounts).

But even worse are the default logging options: By default (atleast on Debian) the log level is set to DEBUG. Additionally if slapd detects optimization opportunities it writes them to the logs - at least once per connection, if not per query. Together with an application that did alot of connections and queries (this was not intendet and got fixed later) THIS RESULTED IN 32 GB LOG FILES IN ≤ 24 HOURS! - enough to fill up the disk and to crash other services (lessons learned: add more monitoring, monitoring, and monitoring and /var/log should be an extra partition). I mean logging optimization hints is certainly nice - it runs faster now (again, I did not do any benchmarks) - but ther verbosity was way too high.

The worst parts are the error messages: When entering a query string with a syntax errors, slapd returns the error code 80 without any additional text - the documentation reveals SO MUCH BETTER meaning: "other error", THIS IS SO HELPFULL... In the end I was able to find the reason why the input was rejected but in my experience the most error messages are little bit more precise.

That moment when somebody types on your Macbook Pro as if he was typing on a typewriter and you feel like saying 'Caveman go back to the stone age' but you can't.

Fuck the sockets.
Fuck the secure sockets.
Fuck that CSP rule in our proxy conf.
Fuck the self script hashed.

After fix everything....
Fuck THEIR proxy that didn't allow wss.

PS iheartsockets!

Plain text passwords in the DB...hashed with MD5!!!

Disclaimer: I am a beginner and I used node just because my employer asked me to.
I needed to create 1400 random users for a platform and I needed to get all the usernames and passwords in a json file and my idea was to just add the object to other collection with all the creditals(passwords are hashed in the db so I couldnt just loop them). For some reason it wouldn't work (i am really bad with async functions) and I just threw the table and copy pasted it from the error screen.
this_shit = {[name1,pass1],[name2,pass2]...}
throw this_shit;
Worked like a charm ^_^

Anyone knows how to hash the OAuth 1.0 signature with RSA-SHA1 using PHP? Using only the value to be hashed and a key?