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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

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?

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?