4 ms·

What good is hundreds of billions of dollars if you can't do the small things right? Or maybe too much money just allows you be mediocre. There seems to be an i

What good is hundreds of billions of dollars if you can't do the small things right? Or maybe too much money just allows you be mediocre. There seems to be an inflection point that happens at, but who knows what that is. Greed and pride come before the fall; hopefully all you people out there working to dethrone these companies will keep kicking.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Security is hard. You can't make this kind of statement if you haven't been a pentester. Do a stint for a year and you'll see. I personally found a remote code exec on one of the biggest security company's servers. I can't be more specific, but suffice to say, it was a small oversight that had big consequences. It's very hard not to screw up the small things. If you've written a large service, and you give me a week with it, odds are better than 50/50 that I'll at least find an XSS. I think out of fifty or so pentests, there were only two that I didn't find an XSS or better, and one was a read-only informational pamphlet.
- SolarNet 9y ago
  Security is hard. But it's impossible when you are idiotic. Only an idiot would think tying someone's personal account to their work account (where their work is counter terrorism) is a good idea!
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    We decided to not give our employees life preservers even though they are sailors. We didn't know they were going to drown!
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  It might be hard, but if you've got those kind of resources available to you and the consequence of being wrong is hundreds of your employees might not ever be safe again, you'd better make sure you are right. A bug in the software, discovered late last year, resulted in the personal profiles of content moderators automatically appearing as notifications in the activity log of the Facebook groups, whose administrators were removed from the platform for breaching the terms of service. The personal details of Facebook moderators were then viewable to the remaining admins of the group. So nobody noticed that or fixed it for 2 weeks (edit: the article actually says that the bug was active for 2 weeks before being discovered and not fixed for another 2 weeks, and was retroactively exposing employees for more than a year - is that security)? Thousands of employees and nobody is checking for that? Come on. We praise Elon sending things into space but FB can't do some basic error checking? Something doesn't add up.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Did I mention that the other pentesters on the team completely missed that remote code exec I found? I hate to brag, but sometimes it's the best way to get a point across. Security is so hard that you can't find everything. One of the dirty secrets of the security industry that nobody likes to talk about is that when you do a pentest, you're deemed secure, but it's overwhelmingly likely that the pentesters didn't find all the vulnerabilities. Security breaches are rare, which is why this system works. But it's not malicious -- it's just very, very hard to be secure all the time. Security isn't even a priority in most cases. I get that you're saying Facebook has resources. But with resources comes scale. How many programmers do you suppose worked on that feature? It could be one or two out of a dozen assigned to that arm of the project. Or it could be a dozen involved in a multi-month refactoring of spaghetti code. Or it could be one overworked person who threw in a "fix" before crawling home to bed. FB hires exceptional people, and even exceptional people ship bugs. By the way, two weeks is a tiny amount of time. A real-world pentest takes about that long to book, unless you already have pentesters on retainer. I'm sure Facebook does, but as I said, pentesters can't catch everything.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      It's frustration speaking, but you're right in what you are saying. Good security folks are valuable for a reason. Good luck to your efforts.
  - williamscales 9y ago
    I think the time to fix is the most telling. I can understand how bugs get shipped sometimes even by good engineers but what I don't understand is how they don't have someone fixing it immediately if lives are endangered.
    - crpatino 9y ago
      People building and manteining the system are not really engaged with customers, and therefore cannot know what the system is used for? And people best qualified to understand that lives were at risk are so far away detached from the development team that their voices got drowned in a sea of pushy, entitled managers-of-very-important-things?
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > Security is hard. So is nuclear reactor management, but we seem to be able to go decades between substantial reactor failures. It helps if your company considers "move fast and break things" to be a cautionary tale instead of a fucking motto. This is the only industry in the world where people actually brag about doing slapdash work.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    There are fewer than 500 nuclear reactors in the world, and those reactors have massively higher oversight and mature safety compliance processes in place than the innumerable websites on the internet (for which approximately all of them share the same default state: insecure). I understand the spirit of your point, but that's not at all a fair comparison. They're just altogether different things, and part of the problem is the nature of the tech industry, in which layers of complexity and security debt from different languages and frameworks can be piled on each other over and over again. I think you should consider Dunning-Kruger here: instead of comparing Facebook's security to nuclear reactor safety, compare it to a company you believe has superior security; moreover, do you think you are appropriately qualified to condemn Facebook's security organization for the proportion of failures it experiences?
- jvdizzle 9y ago
  Sorry, that's not an excuse here. The issue was not a breach. It was an uncaught bug that revealed the moderator's identity when they performed an action against the alledged terrorism group. This is a process and protocol oriented issue. Facebook could have allowed the moderators to use anonymized accounts, or have better error testing.
- thinkfurther 9y ago
  > You can't make this kind of statement if you haven't been a pentester. It's not that anyone broke in and stole things here, it's that Facebook dumped their stuff out of the window. A variation of your point I totally agree with, FB has a lot of moving parts and a lot of employees. Who is this "Facebook" that should be ashamed of their incompetence, right? It's theoretically possible for a million genius engineers to be connected in a bureaucracy created the best of intentions, by the brightest of minds, that still turns their work into swiss cheese. Maybe one problem is making these huge things, which are supposedly monolithic but where one hand doesn't quite know what the other is doing. That's at least a claim worth examining, right? And if you want to exclude the people who don't have that kind of experience because they consider it a dead end that never enticed them, that's both reasonable and circular. Yes, I don't know what I'm talking about, though I have enough imagination and whiffs of knowledge to at least know that -- but no, I don't have to be a ninja coder or a corporate high roller either, I learned to separate wheat from chaff, to appreciate skillful tight programs and to despite gimmicky bloat, sometimes around the Amiga, as a kid. Even as a user who pays a modicum of attention I can do this. I guess floppy drives helped, but the principle is still valid today, nothing changed. So no, I don't need experience in maintaining giants that do a thousand things badly to wish for the return of a lot of little things that do a handful of things well. That's part of the reason I sleep soundly but angrily. It's 2017 and I still can't have a phone call with the quality I had in, say, 1990, because for every step of technological progress and insight, there seem to be five steps of greed and idiocy. It's 2017 and people are on Facebook. For me that's "the" problem, and making a "secure" Facebook is not the solution. Freedom requires vigilance, that's not just words, that means if we have even just one lapse in your history, a period where we were not on your toes, where we left our drink unattended, we should be frightened stiff. A lot of people who should be aren't. We laughed at AOL and whatever that thing was Microsoft cooked up before they realized the internet was going to be more than just a Microsoft product. And now, in the shape of Facebook and others, that won. It was cute to use "googling" as a verb meaning "to look something up on the internet", for a while, but it's not really, and I'm sick of it and I still say it. Yeah yeah, search engines are hard, operating systems are hard, but that stuff used to be even harder and it's silly that we seem to have less diversity now the more resources there are to go around. I don't hate on anyone's success, their success is hating on my imagined opportunities >:[ I'm not sorry for rambling, but as a more sober and delineated final point, something more actionable if you will.. from the article: > Facebook confirmed the security breach in a statement and said it had made technical changes to “better detect and prevent these types of issues from occurring”. What kind of "active" measures do they have in mind? What "type of issue" is this, even? Do they have something in mind they're "just" not sharing, or is that just a bluff? Without saying that, or hey, without actually showing the code and the understandable mistake that lead to this, that just sounds like "yeah, whatever it is you care most about, that's exactly what we'll fix". I know it's an article on The Guardian, I know they just can't show off code, but it's not really my fault that both incompetence and good faith speak in the same meaningless corporate verbiage. Show me the goods, in some way or other. If you say something most people don't understand, but which YOU understand and which you're absolutely sincere and concentrated about, guess what, even babies, even dogs might trust you. And the people who do know what you're talking about can also rest well. But this way, the way this stuff gets handled lest the lawyers freak out, it's just completely empty. To actually learn something, a FB employee would have to violate their contract, and that that's normal doesn't make it less nuts. Yes, security is hard when you build super tall towers that move at hundreds of miles an hour. Then how about let's not?

sillysaurus3 9y ago

Security is hard. You can't make this kind of statement if you haven't been a pentester. Do a stint for a year and you'll see. I personally found a remote code exec on one of the biggest security company's servers. I can't be more specific, but suffice to say, it was a small oversight that had big consequences. It's very hard not to screw up the small things. If you've written a large service, and you give me a week with it, odds are better than 50/50 that I'll at least find an XSS. I think out of fifty or so pentests, there were only two that I didn't find an XSS or better, and one was a read-only informational pamphlet.

SolarNet 9y ago
Security is hard. But it's impossible when you are idiotic. Only an idiot would think tying someone's personal account to their work account (where their work is counter terrorism) is a good idea!
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  We decided to not give our employees life preservers even though they are sailors. We didn't know they were going to drown!
aaron-lebo 9y ago
It might be hard, but if you've got those kind of resources available to you and the consequence of being wrong is hundreds of your employees might not ever be safe again, you'd better make sure you are right. A bug in the software, discovered late last year, resulted in the personal profiles of content moderators automatically appearing as notifications in the activity log of the Facebook groups, whose administrators were removed from the platform for breaching the terms of service. The personal details of Facebook moderators were then viewable to the remaining admins of the group. So nobody noticed that or fixed it for 2 weeks (edit: the article actually says that the bug was active for 2 weeks before being discovered and not fixed for another 2 weeks, and was retroactively exposing employees for more than a year - is that security)? Thousands of employees and nobody is checking for that? Come on. We praise Elon sending things into space but FB can't do some basic error checking? Something doesn't add up.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Did I mention that the other pentesters on the team completely missed that remote code exec I found? I hate to brag, but sometimes it's the best way to get a point across. Security is so hard that you can't find everything. One of the dirty secrets of the security industry that nobody likes to talk about is that when you do a pentest, you're deemed secure, but it's overwhelmingly likely that the pentesters didn't find all the vulnerabilities. Security breaches are rare, which is why this system works. But it's not malicious -- it's just very, very hard to be secure all the time. Security isn't even a priority in most cases. I get that you're saying Facebook has resources. But with resources comes scale. How many programmers do you suppose worked on that feature? It could be one or two out of a dozen assigned to that arm of the project. Or it could be a dozen involved in a multi-month refactoring of spaghetti code. Or it could be one overworked person who threw in a "fix" before crawling home to bed. FB hires exceptional people, and even exceptional people ship bugs. By the way, two weeks is a tiny amount of time. A real-world pentest takes about that long to book, unless you already have pentesters on retainer. I'm sure Facebook does, but as I said, pentesters can't catch everything.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    It's frustration speaking, but you're right in what you are saying. Good security folks are valuable for a reason. Good luck to your efforts.
- williamscales 9y ago
  I think the time to fix is the most telling. I can understand how bugs get shipped sometimes even by good engineers but what I don't understand is how they don't have someone fixing it immediately if lives are endangered.
  - crpatino 9y ago
    People building and manteining the system are not really engaged with customers, and therefore cannot know what the system is used for? And people best qualified to understand that lives were at risk are so far away detached from the development team that their voices got drowned in a sea of pushy, entitled managers-of-very-important-things?
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> Security is hard. So is nuclear reactor management, but we seem to be able to go decades between substantial reactor failures. It helps if your company considers "move fast and break things" to be a cautionary tale instead of a fucking motto. This is the only industry in the world where people actually brag about doing slapdash work.
- dsacco 9y ago
  There are fewer than 500 nuclear reactors in the world, and those reactors have massively higher oversight and mature safety compliance processes in place than the innumerable websites on the internet (for which approximately all of them share the same default state: insecure). I understand the spirit of your point, but that's not at all a fair comparison. They're just altogether different things, and part of the problem is the nature of the tech industry, in which layers of complexity and security debt from different languages and frameworks can be piled on each other over and over again. I think you should consider Dunning-Kruger here: instead of comparing Facebook's security to nuclear reactor safety, compare it to a company you believe has superior security; moreover, do you think you are appropriately qualified to condemn Facebook's security organization for the proportion of failures it experiences?
jvdizzle 9y ago
Sorry, that's not an excuse here. The issue was not a breach. It was an uncaught bug that revealed the moderator's identity when they performed an action against the alledged terrorism group. This is a process and protocol oriented issue. Facebook could have allowed the moderators to use anonymized accounts, or have better error testing.
thinkfurther 9y ago
> You can't make this kind of statement if you haven't been a pentester. It's not that anyone broke in and stole things here, it's that Facebook dumped their stuff out of the window. A variation of your point I totally agree with, FB has a lot of moving parts and a lot of employees. Who is this "Facebook" that should be ashamed of their incompetence, right? It's theoretically possible for a million genius engineers to be connected in a bureaucracy created the best of intentions, by the brightest of minds, that still turns their work into swiss cheese. Maybe one problem is making these huge things, which are supposedly monolithic but where one hand doesn't quite know what the other is doing. That's at least a claim worth examining, right? And if you want to exclude the people who don't have that kind of experience because they consider it a dead end that never enticed them, that's both reasonable and circular. Yes, I don't know what I'm talking about, though I have enough imagination and whiffs of knowledge to at least know that -- but no, I don't have to be a ninja coder or a corporate high roller either, I learned to separate wheat from chaff, to appreciate skillful tight programs and to despite gimmicky bloat, sometimes around the Amiga, as a kid. Even as a user who pays a modicum of attention I can do this. I guess floppy drives helped, but the principle is still valid today, nothing changed. So no, I don't need experience in maintaining giants that do a thousand things badly to wish for the return of a lot of little things that do a handful of things well. That's part of the reason I sleep soundly but angrily. It's 2017 and I still can't have a phone call with the quality I had in, say, 1990, because for every step of technological progress and insight, there seem to be five steps of greed and idiocy. It's 2017 and people are on Facebook. For me that's "the" problem, and making a "secure" Facebook is not the solution. Freedom requires vigilance, that's not just words, that means if we have even just one lapse in your history, a period where we were not on your toes, where we left our drink unattended, we should be frightened stiff. A lot of people who should be aren't. We laughed at AOL and whatever that thing was Microsoft cooked up before they realized the internet was going to be more than just a Microsoft product. And now, in the shape of Facebook and others, that won. It was cute to use "googling" as a verb meaning "to look something up on the internet", for a while, but it's not really, and I'm sick of it and I still say it. Yeah yeah, search engines are hard, operating systems are hard, but that stuff used to be even harder and it's silly that we seem to have less diversity now the more resources there are to go around. I don't hate on anyone's success, their success is hating on my imagined opportunities >:[ I'm not sorry for rambling, but as a more sober and delineated final point, something more actionable if you will.. from the article: > Facebook confirmed the security breach in a statement and said it had made technical changes to “better detect and prevent these types of issues from occurring”. What kind of "active" measures do they have in mind? What "type of issue" is this, even? Do they have something in mind they're "just" not sharing, or is that just a bluff? Without saying that, or hey, without actually showing the code and the understandable mistake that lead to this, that just sounds like "yeah, whatever it is you care most about, that's exactly what we'll fix". I know it's an article on The Guardian, I know they just can't show off code, but it's not really my fault that both incompetence and good faith speak in the same meaningless corporate verbiage. Show me the goods, in some way or other. If you say something most people don't understand, but which YOU understand and which you're absolutely sincere and concentrated about, guess what, even babies, even dogs might trust you. And the people who do know what you're talking about can also rest well. But this way, the way this stuff gets handled lest the lawyers freak out, it's just completely empty. To actually learn something, a FB employee would have to violate their contract, and that that's normal doesn't make it less nuts. Yes, security is hard when you build super tall towers that move at hundreds of miles an hour. Then how about let's not?