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.

Guy: I don't trust password managers
Me: so how do you remember passwords?
Guy: oh, I just keep them in a note in the iPhone notes app/iCloud.

This cuts deep

Friend of mine killed his MacBook with some Softdrink.

Just poured it all over his poor a1502.

He let it dry for a few days, it starts to work again.
Except the battery.

Goes on Amazon and buys a new battery.

New battery doesn't work either and so he tells me about it and I as stupid as I am couldn't resist the temptation to finally work on a MacBook like my "hero" Lois Rossmann does.

So turns out the board is good.
Cleaned it up and basically nothing happened to it.

So what's the deal with "los batlerias"?

The first got hit by liquid, the second had a broken connection to a cell.
That could have happened through my friend, installing it without testing it first, or at the seller, so it being a DOA battery.

Now away from the stupidity of my friend and the situation to the actual source for this rant.

Once something happens to a modern Managed battery, the Battery Management System (BMS) disconnects the voltage from the system and goes into an error state, staying there and not powering anything ever again.
For noobs, it's dead. Buy a new one.

But It can be reset, depending you know how to, and which passwords were set at the factory.
Yes, the common Texas instruments BQ20Zxx chips have default passwords, and apple seems to leav them at default.

The Usb to SMBus adaptors arrived a few days ago and I went to prod the BMS.

There is a very nice available for Windows called BE2works, that I used the demo of to go in and figure out stuff. The full version supports password cracking, the demo not.

After some time figuring out how Smart Battery Systems (SBS) "API" works, I got to actually enter the passwords into the battery to try get into manufacturer and full access mode.

Just to realise, they don't unlock the BMS.

So, to conclude, my friend bought a "new" battery that was most likely cut out of a used / dead macbook, which reports 3000mah as fully charged instead of the 6xxx mah that it should have, with 0 cycles and 0hours used.
And non default access.

This screams after those motherfuckers scaming the shit out of people on Amazon, with refurb, reset, and locked fucken batteries.

I could kill those people right now.

Last but not least,
My friend theoretically can't send it back because I opened the battery to fix the broken connection.
Though maybe, it'll get send back anyway, with some suprise in the package.

Too week 😋

I have bank accounts with 5 different banks.
I HAVE TO use 4-5 different government websites.

Every fucking place: you cannot use these "~-/;^"(some others too) symbols in your password.

Are you freaking fucking kidding me!! And all of them have a limit of 12or15 characters.

If this wasn't mind numbingly stupid enough, they fucking go ahead and force you to change password every fucking month or two.

THIS IS NOT SECURITY. YOU SHOULDN'T FORCE SOMEONE TO LIMIT THERE PASSWORDS TO:
- CERTAIN CHARACTERS
- A 15 CHARACTER SIZE LIMIT
- THRN OVERTHAT, FORCE TO CHANGE PASSWPRDS PERIODICALLY.

ALL THE 5 MAJOR FUCKING BANKS IN INDIA.

FUUUUUCCCCKKKKK YOUU 🖕

Anyone ever entered a password and it keeps saying wrong password, so you decide to reset the fucking password and now the problem is ....the systems/website tells you that you can't reset the password to your current password or a password you are already using... like okay what the fuck!!!!!.....

TL;DR I'm fucking sick and tired of Devs cutting corners on security! Things can't be simply hidden a bit; security needs to be integral to your entire process and solution. Please learn from my story and be one of the good guys!

As I mentioned before my company used plain text passwords in a legacy app (was not allowed to fix it) and that we finally moved away from it. A big win! However not the end of our issues.

Those Idiot still use hardcoded passwords in code. A practice that almost resulted in a leak of the DB admin password when we had to publish a repo for deployment purposes. Luckily I didn't search and there is something like BFG repo cleaner.

I have tried to remedy this by providing a nice library to handle all kinds of config (easy config injection) and a default json file that is always ignored by git. Although this helped a lot they still remain idiots.
The first project in another language and boom hardcoded password. Dev said I'll just remove before going live. First of all I don't believe him. Second of all I asked from history? "No a commit will be good enough..."

Last week we had to fix a leak of copyrighted contend.
How did this happen you ask? Well the secure upload field was not used because they thought that the normal one was good enough. "It's fine as long the URL to the file is not published. Besides now we can also use it to upload files that need to be published here"
This is so fucking stupid on so many levels. NEVER MIX SECURE AND INSECURE CONTENT it is confusing and hard to maintain. Hiding behind a URL that thousands of people have access to is also not going to work. We have the proof now...
Will they learn? Maybe for a short while but I remain sceptic. I hope a few DevrRanters do!

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.

Philosophy 🤣🤣
Credits: commitstrip.

So my ISP decided it was ok for them to log into my router remotely and re enable the wifi.

I turned it off for a reason and no your excuse that it will improve my upload speed is bullshit you stupid patronising fucking shithead.

I'm now seriously looking into cancelling my service with you because you don't respect your customers or their wishes.

Also I'm guessing there's a default backdoor password into the router as I changed all the passwords I could find. Meaning the whole thing is horribly insecure.

Just received a mail from my college that my college's student account password does not contain any special characters and I should change it immediately. Wtf? How did they know that?

!!oracle

I'm trying to install a minecraft modpack to play with a friend, and I'm super psyced about it. According to the modpack instructions, the first step is to download the java8 jre. Not sure if I actually need it or not, but it can download while I'm doing everything else, so I dutifully go to the download page and find the appropriate version. The download link does point to the file, but redirects to a login page instead. Apparently I need an oracle account to download anything on their site. stupid.

So I make an account. It requires my life story, or at least full name and address and phone number. stupid. So my name is now "fuck off" and I live in Hell, Michigan. My email is also "gofuckyourself" because I'm feeling spiteful. Also, for some reason every character takes about 3/4ths of a second to type, so it's very slow going. Passwords also cannot contain spaces, which makes me think they're doing some stupid "security" shenanigans like custom reversible encryption with some 5th grade math. or they're just stupid. Whatever, I make the stupid account.

Afterwards, I try to log in, but apparently my browser-saved credentials are wrong? I try a few more times, try enabling all of the javascripts, etc. No beans. Okay, maybe I can't use it until I verify the email? That actually makes some sense. Fine, I go check the throwaway inbox. No verification email. It's been like five minutes, but it's oracle so they probably just failed at it like everything else, so I try to have them resend the email. I find the resend link, and try it. Every time I enter my email address, though, it either gives me a validation error or a server error. I try a few mores times, and give up. I try to log in again; no dice. Giving up, I go do something else for awhile.

On a whim later, I check for the verification email again. Apparently it just takes bloody forever, but it did show up. Except instead of the first name "Fuck" I entered, I'm now "Andrew", apparently. okay.... whatever. I click the verify button anyway, and to my surprise it actually works, and says that I'm now allowed to use my account. Yay!

So, I go back to the login page (from the download link) and enter my credentials. A new error appears! I cannot use redirects, apparently, and "must type in the page address I want to visit manually." huh? okay, i go to the page directly, and see the same bloody error because of course i do because oracle fucking sucks. So I close the page, go back to the download list, click the link, wait for the login page redirect (which is so totally not allowed, apparently, except it works and manual navigation does not. yay backwards!), and try to log in.

Instead of being presented with an error because of the redirect, it lets me (try to) log in. But despite using prefilled creds (and also copy/pasting), it tells me they're invalid. I open a new tab container, clear the cache (just to be thorough), and repeat the above steps. This time it redirects me to a single signon server page (their concept of oauth), and presents me with a system error telling me to contact "the Administrator." -.- Any second attempts, refreshes, etc. just display the same error.

Further attempts to log in from the download page fail with the same invalid credentials error as before.

Fucking oracle and their reverse Midas touch.

"I know, I'll set my password as '12345'. No one will guess it because it's too simple right? RIGHT?"

I used to work for a Mexican bank in Mexico, as a developer I opened (and use) an account, since the bank was not famous(most of its business was with the government), going to the bank and see no waiting lines was an advantage, so I started using it as my only bank account even nowadays.

Now I live in NYC, and some years later I see on the news the bank merged(was absorbed) with another bank, 'sounds good, I don't care' I thought.

Well, I open my online account and the nightmare begins:

1) Redirection to the 2nd bank page
2) My credentials does not work
3) Call the original bank(no answers)
4) After several calls and days I got a phone contact
5) 'well, try all other passwords you have' (transaction passwords, operative passwords, login passwords, etc), among many other stupid answers, which by the way, were preceded by infinite question about the 2nd bank, like:

- when did you open the account with the 2nd bank?
- what is your 2nd bank account number

6) after 20 calls like that, they asked for documents, information and screenshots, and send all that to the 2nd bank tech help email.

7) After several days a person responded: 'Go to your bank(which fucking bank?)' and ask for a new user.

8) a ton of calls to know what bank I was assigned

9) called the bank: 'well, you have to come in person(no exceptions allowed) and request to close your 1st bank account and open a 2nd bank account' (I am not sure if that is gonna work)

All the technology nowadays and still I have to travel thousands of miles hoping this 'solution' works.

to be continue....

New password cannot be one of your four previous passwords.
Password must conatin upper and lower case characters, at least two numbers and two special characters
Password cannot contain five or more consecutive letters of username.
Password cannot include any _illegal patterns_.

Locked out of your system? Drive over to HQ and ask the admins to reset your password in person.

Password policy for a big water company site in Spain.

Translation: Between 6 and 10 characters (only letters and numbers, no spaces)

In guess they have a VARCHAR(10) password field in their db?!?

I just read the rant: "I use base64 to encrypt my passwords". Found it hilarious!

But I can't believe the amount of people taking it seriously in the comments section! I see just one of these possible explanations.

A) They want to show off
B) They are unable to detect sarcasm
C) They have mastered trolling and I'm stupid

In case it's C, wouldn't this rant be considered as reverse trolling? 😎

Why the fuck would you allow special characters in your passwords, when some of them are considered "potentially dangerous!" can't even login ffs!

I wonder how many decades it will take until employees stop to fucking stick their passwords to the computer screen at their station. It is a complete fucking nightmare if you are responsible for the network!
Can we bring back the guillotine? But it must be stub!
Those nitwits shall suffer!

Microsoft seriously hates security, first they do enforce an numer, upper and lowercase combined with a special character.
But then they allow no passwords longer than 16 characters....
After that they complain that "FuckMicrosoft!1" is a password they've seen to often, gee thanks for the brute force tips.

To add insult to injury the first displayed "tip" take a look at the attached image.

“Password length mustn't exceed seventeen characters.”
Why? Why do some Web sites still have this rule? It's 2018. We should be using passwords of at least twenty-four characters. This is crap.

*logs in to pc*
- Your password will expire in 3 days. Consider changing it.
+ yeah sure...
*tries to change password*
- Your password must be different from your old 25 passwords
+ ....
+ What the fuck?!? I mean, really, what the fuck is this bullshit? You force me to use EXACTLY 8 char long passwords and this? Fuck you!

Tl;dr stupid password requirements

Begin quote

Password must not contain any non-alphanumeric characters.

Your Password change was not accepted. Enter your current Password correctly following the rules for New Passwords. Please try again.

Passwords must be between 8 and 12 characters in length and MUST contain each of the following:

At least 1 lower case character (a-z)
At least 1 upper case character (A-Z)
At least 1 numeric digit (0-9)

But, MUST NOT contain:

more than five repeating characters in a row (e.g. 111111356 would not be valid, but 112233445 would be valid)
spaces or other special characters

NOTE: Your new password cannot be the same as any of your 10 previous passwords.

End quote

Are you fucking kidding me? Only (26+26+10)^8 through
(26+26+10)^12 different passwords to go through? It's like the oxygen wasters that built this website give zero fucks about security.

Why? This is the site that manages money and investments. Just allow passwords up to 64 characters, allow any ascii character and just fucking encod the characters to prevent any Injunction.

"The password must have 7 or 8 characters (numbers and/or letters)”
says Movistar, the biggest ISP and telecom company in Spain ... I can't even.

Password

And another shitty hoster...
Translation:
“The password is to long. Please choose a password that is not longer than 16 characters”

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)

Well done zippo/willianpenn!

How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.

But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.

And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.

I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!

But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.

I recently went to an office to open up a demat account

Manager: so your login and password will be sent to you and then once you login you'll be prompted to change the password

Me: *that's a good idea except that you're sending me the password which could be intercepted* ok

Manager: you'll also be asked to set a security question...

Me: *good step*

Manager: ...which you'll need to answer every time you want to login

Me: *lol what? Maybe that's good but kinda seems unnecessary. Instead you guys could have added two factor authentication* cool

Manager: after every month you'll have to change your password

Me : *nice* that's good

Manager: so what you can do change the password to something and then change it back to what it was. Also to remember it keep it something on your number or some date

Me: what? But why? If you suggest users to change it back to what it was then what is the point of making them change the password in the first place?

Manager: it's so that you don't have to remember so many different passwords

Me: but you don't even need to remember passwords, you can just use softwares like Kaspersky key manager where you can generate a password and use it. Also it's a bad practice if you suggest people who come here to open an account with such methods.

Manager: nothing happens, I'm myself doing that since past several years.

Me: *what a fucking buffoon* no, sir. Trust me that way it gets much easier to get access to your system/account. Also you shouldn't keep your passwords written down like that (there were some password written down on their whiteboard)

Manager: ....ok...so yeah you need sign on these papers and you'll be done

Me:(looking at his face...) Umm..ok

Logs in to client office 365.

Big recommendation at the top

"Disable password auto expiry, it's currently set to 90 days"

Why is this a recommendation? I suppose there's an argument that making a user change every now and again will weaken their passwords over time, but really?

J.P. Stinking Morgan Chase does not allow special characters in passwords.

This is stupid.

Sites requiring a maximum password length, does it mean they store the passwords in clear text?
Or what would be a plausible explanation for this stupid requirement?

To all websites requiring at least one upper case, one lower case, one number, one special character, 25 emoji and 49 unicorns in the password when signing up.

If you say something is required, then your regex BETTER be checking ONLY for those things. You should not have hidden requirements for passwords that users are supposed to dream about and know. Especially if it's a super time-sensitive thing that they should have opened 2 Fridays ago.

I had to pull my hair out for 20 minutes (that felt like an hour) before looking at their code and reading their regex. The regex was different from what the page said the requirements actually were. What were they even thinking? 😑

The rest of everything related to this organization uses an SSO system, why can't they just use it? Isn't the whole point of SSO to avoid a different login for every tiny part of the system?

I wonder what the other less technically inclined people using the system are doing right now. Sadly, I have no way of letting them know.

I sincerely hope the dev that made that website faces the same thing while picking a password for creating an account somewhere else and realizes what he/she did.

I really needed to let it out.
I feel much better now.

Time to take out the stress ball :)

This is not a rant. Not really. It's more expressing my own insecurity with a certain topic, which somehow upsets me sometimes (the insecurity, not the topic though).

I have nearly no knowledge about security/privacy stuff. I mean, yeah, I know how to choose secure passwords and don't make stupid DAU mistakes. The very basics you would expect someone to have after a CS bachelor's degree.
But other than that... Nothing. And I would like to get a bit into that stuff, but I have no clue where to start. First getting my head wrapped around low-level stuff like network layers? Or something completely else.
This topic is so intimidating to me as it seems huge, I have no idea where to start, and I feel that if you don't have "full" knowledge, you are going to make mistakes which you might not even notice.

I sometimes get really scared about having an account hijacked or similar. Also in our job it seems to become more and more of a topic we should know about.

Anybody got any advice?
I am looking for a way to improve my knowledge in security in general for professional reasons and my knowledge about privacy for private reasons.
It's just, every time I start reading something related it seems that I am lacking some other knowledge etc...

When a software improvement organization (cough Scrum.org) does this stupid crap with their passwords, causing us all to be pwned.

Why are people so stupid?

Everything you tell them is like hot air for them.
For example, we told them not to write down passwords and what are they doing? They write them down.
We tell them not to install private software on their work phones and what are they doing? They install private software.
We tell them to lock their workstations If they aren't at their place. But their not doing it.

I really hate people...

My work network AD password has to be changed every 90 days or so and it is really getting to me now. I'm beginning to run out of passwords to use and may soon have to resort to writing them down on a piece of paper and lock it somewhere.

I get why we need to change it often. What I don't like is the stupid validation rules AD uses to check passwords. It doesn't allow variations and you have to use something completely new.

I have only been in the job for about 8 months and I have had a nightmare experience updating my password recently as the synchronisation failed and I was locked out of my accounts for a day or 2 rendering my useless and having to call support for help.

How the he'll am I supposed to remember my passwords when I have to change them that often!!!

FUCK YOU, Lastpass. By all means, look for the passwords I use to match your master password. But when I type that password mistakenly, don't assume it's the one I use.

BRB, GOTTA ROTATE MY PASSWORD AROUND YOUR STUPID REQUIREMENTS.

We should find a way to replace passwords: any password manager which I tried is inaccurate in identifying login forms and is too hard to use for non technical people older than 40 and convince people to not use some stupid name + birth year combination as their passwords is a frustrating uphill battle.

Not dev per sé but annoys see he'll out of me on a monthly basis... 30 day password expiration, how does that make things more secure?! The thing that makes it worse is that I can't use any previous 28 passwords or anything too similar... Now I'm stuck with a 36 character password which I have to put in everytime my work machine decides to lock out... Which is less than a minute of not touching it.

What's that? No I can't turn around and answer a question because if I do I'll be taking 20mins off of my future career prospects as I'm working on leveling up my inevitable arthritis

I did an engineering quiz yesterday as a way of introducing a new database the school recently got access to. You had to sign up for the site.

- Passwords were max 20 characters (which is better than 10, but still, why???)
- You couldn't use special characters, but there was NO INDICATION ANYWHERE THAT THAT WAS THE CASE. It would just silently fail to log in. I had to open the browser console to figure out what wasn't working. FUCK

When after registration on some website you get your password, that you just set, send back to you in an email. Why the fuck do they store and transmit passwords in plain text.