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Search - "secrets"
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My last wk93 story, the time we discovered school faculty was spying on students and we uncovered student's deepest secrets.
I call it, kiddiegate.
So if you've read my past rants you've noticed I did some pretty childish and reckless stuff with my highschool's systems when I was younger, but nothing compares to this thing.
After resetting the sysadmin account pwd on some machines it occurred to me I could write a keylogger to capture teachers Moodle accounts and so on, I decided to try it out on a regular lab computer first.
Imagine my surprise when I found a hidden keylogger already installed! I couldn't believe it but then I thought, what if other PC's have it? So I recruited my mates and teached them the process to check if a PC had been infected...ALL PCs were, over 30 computers we checked had been logging for over 3 months! That damn sysadmin! >:[
We were shocked and angry, but then I thought "hey. . . My work has been done for me, better take advantage"
So we did, we extracted each log and then removed it from the PCs along with the keyloggers. There were hundreds of records and then one day we started snooping into the fb accounts of some students (we shouldn't have) we uncovered so many nasty, shocking secrets...
One of the school's lady's man had a drunk one nighter with one of our gay friends, the most secluded and shy guy was sexting like crazy with 15 chicks at the same time, things like that...we promised to never say a word and deleted the logs.
After that we didn't do much and continued highschool as every teenage minor should, getting drunk and avoiding responsibilities, though we could never see many of our classmates the same way. The sysadmin was fired shortly after I graduated, no reason was stablished.
I want to clear out we were minors and laws in my country weren't clearly stablished at the time plus no harm was ever done. I don't condone hacking or any kind of illegal activity, just thought I'd share.6 -
EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...
The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.
One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.
Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.
Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!
The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.
At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."
"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"
"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".
Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.
As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.
Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?
This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.6 -
Microsoft Manager: "We need to slap ChatGPT onto Bing....STAT!"
Devs: "There won't be enough time to test security."
Microsoft Manager: *Throws hands in the air* "Who cares!!?? Just get it done!"
Devs: "Ok, boss."
https://arstechnica.com/information...5 -
You know. I think people trashing chatgpt detracts from the fact that if it is actually functioning as stated it's still a goddamm miracle of science!
I mean are we all really that jaded ?
You can type a plain English request in and a COMPUTER PROGRAM sends you a Novel response that may reflect the bias of its dataset and the bias of people trying to keep "secrets" but otherwise it sends a response formulated from extensive data.
That's a breakthrough
Quick acting like an alpha that was frozen years ago apparently is the RTM!29 -
I wanna go back to the age where a C program was considered secure and isolated based on its system interface rathe than its speed. I want a future where safety does not imply inefficiency. I hate spectre and I hate that an abstraction as simple and robust as assembly is so leaky that just by exposing it you've pretty much forfeited all your secrets.
And I especially hate that we chose to solve this by locking down everything rather than inventing an abstraction that's a similarly good compile target but better represents CPUs and therefore does not leak.31 -
Friday, forced deploy day for last & current months work. Been stockpiled due to holiday.
Yesterday boss demoed the product to clients so they expect to test today.
Early o'fuck this morning, a coworker managed to drop all secrets and env vars from CI pipelines and trigger a deploy leaving production broken...
It's gonna be a long and busy Friday... -
Last week summary:
-questioning my identity (I’m cleaning and realised I forgot I used to like many activities I forgot and decided to give them more time)
-questioning how tf my unconscious seems to always plan ahead of me (ah yes I can do this cause I prep… why tf did I prepare for this?)
-questioning my skills (just a standard imposter syndrome, nothing to see here, move on)
-questioning my worth (as above)
-questioning how tf somebody connected to a secret account I have (spoiler: they don’t know and it’s a crazy coincidence… but now I know secrets about them 😏)
-randomly freezing during everyday life for all the above points
Job wise all is cool, tho 🎊2 -
I decided to use Docker Compose on a tiny project that essentially consists of an API and a Caddy server that serves static files and proxies to the API, all of this running on an EC2 t1-nano. I made this admittedly odd choice because I wanted to learn Compose and simultaneously forego figuring out why the node-gyp bindings for sqlite3 refuse to build on EC2 even though it builds just fine on my machine.
I am storing secrets in .env which is committed into the private GH repo. Just now I came across a rant that described the same security practice and it sounded pretty bad from an outside perspective so I decided to research alternatives.
Apparently professional methods for storing secrets generally have higher system requirements than a t1-nano. I'm not looking for a complex service orchestration system, I'm not trying to run an enterprise on this poor little cloud-based raspberry pi. I just want to move my secrets out of the Git repo,
Any tips?9 -
What is the point of kubernetes "secrets" if it encodes the sensitive information as a base64 string if anyone can decode and read raw data using any base64 decoder tool?5