Comment by applfanboysbgon
3 months ago
Software development jobs are too accessible. Jobs with access to/control over millions of people's data should require some kind of genuine software engineering certification, and there should be business-cratering fines for something as egregious as completely ignoring security reports. It is ridiculous how we've completely normalised leaks like this on a weekly or almost-daily basis.
At my last job, I opened up Shodan in my free time and clicked through our ASN with the free filters. In two minutes I found multiple iDRACs online. Surprisingly, none had default pw. But one had a public exploit vuln that was years old allowing takeover...
Turns out during the firewall hardware migration years ago, several units firewalls were switched to audit mode (not enforcing rules). So an entire institute (health research!) had their whole subnet public with zero firewalls, both the server OS and iDRAC interfaces. iDRAC isn't even supposed to be on the same VLAN per Dell let alone on the internet.
To top it off, after making some tickets (admittedly not all as serious, ex MFP web UIs on internet) from Shodan, I got pushback from the firewall team for causing units to submit to many changes.
I also got in trouble with our Qualys analyst for undermining his work because he hadn't gotten to that units annual review yet, even though I didn't even have a Qualys login. (And even if I had found it there, since when do we wait for annual reviews to fix that?)
It took at least three weeks internally to get it fixed, and by that I mean only the iDRAC IP blocked with the server itself still wide open.
And that's only because I mentioned it to my manager (awesome guy and not formally responsible for firewall rules) after an unrelated no firewall host incident came through and he authorized an emergency rule.
Huawei Enterprise devices tend to have a CAPTCHA by default on their BMC/OOB GUIs or the other various system/infrastructure service GUIs (such as the HuaweiCloud/FusionCloud products). I'm guessing the reason is that people leave the management ports and GUIs wide open to the public Internet, so the CAPTCHA is protecting at least from the very basic script kiddie bots.
They may be part of it, but as a publicly traded company, there's got to be a at least a few people there with a fancy pedigree (not that that actually means they are good at their job or care). But if such a test existed, they presumably would have passed it.
They also have an ISO 27001 certificate (they try to claim a bunch of AWSs certs by proxy on their security page, which is ironic as they say AWS stores most of their data while apparently all uploads are on this).
A while ago I had a customer come to me who had a simple Shopify site and fell for a phishing type of attack where someone simply had an email like "shopify_security at gmail" and kept telling her she needed to apply all kinds of changes. They laundered the payments through Fiverr.
Then they would install WordPress plugins to make the site worse and claim even more "work" was needed.
I documented the entire thing, including my own credentials, and sent it off to Fiverr. Fiverr's response was everything was fine and there was nothing they could do about it, even though it was obvious fraud.
Google never did anything about it either, nor did Shopify.
Given how they handled such a minor situation like that... I guess it shouldn't be surprising they're just asleep at the switch for a major one like this.
> But if such a test existed, they presumably would have passed it
Sure, and now they could have their credentials revoked, potential be legally liable, and never find work in this field again which would prevent them from cocking up another company this way
> should require some kind of genuine software engineering certification
Wouldn't change a thing, other than add another hassle you have to pay for to do your job.
This is the result of carelessness, not someone who didn't know that private data should be private because they weren't certified.
This is the result of somebody who has no idea how the fuck the tech they're using works. They surely knew it should be private, but they did not know that they were making it publicly available because they were blindly fumbling their way around in a job beyond their competence level. There is a 0% chance this was ordinary carelessness, in the form of "I know better but don't care enough", this is so clearly a case of "I don't know what I'm doing".
Any time someone tries to suggest certification as a solution I ask the same question: How would it have solved this problem?
Would the certification require someone to take an official certification test for the framework used?
And therefore we’re only allowed to use frameworks which have certification tests available?
If you want to write some new software, do you have to generate a certification for it and get that approved so people are allowed to use it?
Sounds like a great way to force us all to use Big Company approved software because they’re the only ones with pockets deep enough to play all of the certification games
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It's so much worse in the industry, the truth is that many people literally have no idea how to secure things, what to secure, why to secure it - they pay no attention and are plainly ignorant of the state of the world and oftentimes just stupid.
I worked at a company where a customer called confused because when they googled our company as they did every day to login to their portal they found that drivers licenses we stored were available on the public internet.
The devs literally didn't know about direct object access and thought obfuscation was enough, didn't know about how robots.txt worked, didn't know about google webmaster shit, didn't know about sitemaps, they were just the cheapest labor the company could find who could do the thing.
This is a huge portion of outsourced labor in my experience, not because they are worse overseas in any respect, but because the people looking for cheap labor were always looking for the cheapest labor and had no idea how that applied to the actual technical work of running their business.
>they were just the cheapest labor the company could find who could do the thing.
Thats the problem right there. The company doesn't care. No amount of personal certifications is going to fix that.
It MUST be on the companies. They should be fined out of existence for such breaches and they would quickly change tune.
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>Wouldn't change a thing..
That's exactly what certification or licensure does; it imposes financial, civil, and criminal penalties for malpractice.
The liability of incurring penalties quickly outweigh the benefit of arbitraging costs with an unqualified practitioner.
I think just putting it on the companies is enough. If the fines are serious and can put your company out of business, and are enforced, then the companies themselves will probably work out processes for not doing stupid stuff. Whether that be creating some sort of certifications that would be prized by the companies, knowing to hire a specialized team for a security review, or anything else.
If everyone knows that messing up security gets you in real trouble and the company loses real money, and it happens all the time, and it's not just "Facebook fined $x million for doing shady stuff", then I think the industry will adapt.
Like when GDPR got released and no matter if I thought we are or are not handling PII, I had to read up and double-check my assumptions just because it was being talked about all over the place and it would be embarrassing to be caught with your pants down when you didn't actually intend to do a shady thing.
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some kind of genuine software engineering certification
That only gives those in power another way to push people into toeing the line. There's enough corporate authoritarianism these days as it is already. Give Stallman's "Right to Read" a read. His dystopia is exactly where we're going to be headed quickly if we keep demanding someone to "do something".
"The optimal amount of fraud is nonzero."
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
You're responding to literally 7 words out of context.
> Jobs with access to/control over millions of people's data should require some kind of genuine software engineering certification
FAANG, Fortune 500, etc., almost universally go out of their way to violate user freedom in pursuit of profit. Regulation is practically the only way to force megacorps to respect users' rights and improve their security, as evidenced by right-to-repair, surveillance/privacy, and so on.
And none of that has anything to do with users' individual rights to create, run, and modify their own software.
(Yes, regulatory capture exists, no, it doesn't mean all regulation is bad.)
If the megacorps are going in that direction of being strictly regulated, the rest of the industry will follow. It's the general movement of the Overton Window that's the underlying issue.
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I once worked in a company and noticed that customer financial statements were publicly accessible. Ran into the software team. And got the reply that no one told them that it should be behind authentication. Some people really don't use their own brains.
If you do, you get into trouble with the hierarchy, all those middle-managers and responsibility distributing committees will be unemployed.
Teachers have to be licensed and keep up on licensing.
Plumbers. Electricians. Lawyers. Doctors. Hell, I have to get a license to run my own business.
Why shouldn't software come with a branch for licenses if you're working with sensitive data?
We're going the other way: now any random vibe coded slop is the norm.
Normalize "vibe-plumbing"
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Hairdressers!
People at my company don't even lock their computer when they walk away from their desk. Which yeah it's in a controlled environment but still.
My work has a “donuts” slack channel for this. You find an unlocked computer you post “donuts on me!” Social pressure says they buy the office donuts.
Still get a few a week, but at least it’s public and amusing.
This would be borderline illegal in most countries. Not very enforcable, sure, but illegal.
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We used to flip display upside down in display options, which also reverses the mouse. We'd then lock the PC and disconnect the keyboard. After they figured out the keyboard had been pulled they often couldn't work out why their screen was upside down...
At least I'm sure LLM tools deploying code to production won't result in this happening more frequently. "Make sure it's secure. Make no mistakes."
"You were right, mistakes have been made!"
good thing it's getting easier to code - nothing bad can come of this :-)
Unfortunately everything is going in the opposite direction.
We are in the age of AI-slop AI-everything AI-break-it AI-fix-it.
Software companies are competing with each other on how low they can push the quality and still get away with it.
There's no reward or incentive for paying attention to the details or the quality. In fact you will get penalised for it.