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Yes but how many people looked at these logs, saw the passwords, and said nothing? If it was logged presumably the logs were viewed from time to time. The mista

Yes but how many people looked at these logs, saw the passwords, and said nothing? If it was logged presumably the logs were viewed from time to time. The mistake is easy to make, but it's also easy to correct if there is a culture to report such mistakes.

wlesieutre 8y ago
That's true. Kerbs article says: > My Facebook insider said access logs showed some 2,000 engineers or developers made approximately nine million internal queries for data elements that contained plain text user passwords.
- meitme 8y ago
  Those numbers are pretty meaningless without some concept of what queries they were making. When I was working with large logs I'd regularly pull huge amounts of logs to only look at maybe a handful of lines. Even then often only scanning for the things I'm specifically working on. Not saying this is what happened just saying those 2,000 employees almost definitely were not doing careful analysis on the complete result of their 9 million queries(And shouldn't have!).
  - mk89 8y ago
    Out of 2000 users, there was not one that had a look at username/password? Impressive. Also developers during dev. Seriously, this is not justifiable, it's pure laziness if we want to be positive.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    'Only scanning for the things one is working on' to the point of missing huge security holes or safety risks is exactly that's wrong with the industrial division-of-labor approach. Workers start to assume that even if they do notice a problem, someone else is either going to fix it or has examined and OKed the current procedure. Workers who speak up and assert that something they noticed actually looks more important than whatever task they were originally assigned to are typically punished rather than rewarded, and fired if they make too much of a fuss because otherwise managerial authority might be diminished. Most firms run internally like a dictatorship, and given Facebook's absurd ownership structure (where there are voting and non-voting shares Zuckerberg retains a majority of the voting shares) it's a recipe for dysfunction.
    - tptacek 8y ago
      This is true but not very interesting. Like literally every large tech company in the entire industry, Facebook has a specialized team of people that work on security --- it has one of the better versions of that team, for what it's worth. Just like ordinary Apple engineers, ordinary Google engineers, ordinary LinkedIn engineers, and ordinary Airbnb engineers, ordinary Facebook engineers don't have an end-to-end picture of how all of security at Facebook works. There's no evidence that there was whistleblowing suppression about this issue anywhere at Facebook, is there?
  - vijay_n 8y ago
    What if one among the 2000 was curious ?
code_duck 8y ago
The article indicates it was searchable and used for something by employees, so most of these comments to the effect of ‘they must have been doing this accidentally because Facebook is just so big therefore they are excused’ are invalid. Some group of people did this on purpose and knew it was happening.
- chatmasta 8y ago
  You're probably being downvoted for speculation, but that sounds completely reasonable to me. At least one person had to have noticed a password in a log file they were viewing at some time. Most people viewing log files know that passwords should not be there. It would trigger alarm bells, and depending on the person, also excitement -- you have somebody's facebook password. It's conceivable that someone then told their friend at work, and a few of these 2,000 developers knew of this secret internal stash of passwords they could access whenever they wanted to "prank" someone on facebook...
  - YokoZar 8y ago
    Why would humans be reading these log files?
    - chatmasta 8y ago
      For plenty of reasons, I'm sure. From the article: > My Facebook insider said access logs showed some 2,000 engineers or developers made approximately nine million internal queries for data elements that contained plain text user passwords.
      - YokoZar 8y ago
        That doesn't sound like a human reading the log. It sounds like automation. A script counting the number of successful logins, for instance, could read the same data element that unintentionally contained passwords.
        8y ago
rmason 8y ago
Zuck doesn't believe in hiring employees over 30 because they're not 'smart' about tech. Great example why that's a mistake. If he did, someone would have seen that with 10-15 years of corporate experience and would have found that simply unacceptable. They also would have had the gravitas to know how to escalate things to the top and gotten it fixed.

wlesieutre 8y ago

That's true. Kerbs article says: > My Facebook insider said access logs showed some 2,000 engineers or developers made approximately nine million internal queries for data elements that contained plain text user passwords.

meitme 8y ago
Those numbers are pretty meaningless without some concept of what queries they were making. When I was working with large logs I'd regularly pull huge amounts of logs to only look at maybe a handful of lines. Even then often only scanning for the things I'm specifically working on. Not saying this is what happened just saying those 2,000 employees almost definitely were not doing careful analysis on the complete result of their 9 million queries(And shouldn't have!).
- mk89 8y ago
  Out of 2000 users, there was not one that had a look at username/password? Impressive. Also developers during dev. Seriously, this is not justifiable, it's pure laziness if we want to be positive.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  'Only scanning for the things one is working on' to the point of missing huge security holes or safety risks is exactly that's wrong with the industrial division-of-labor approach. Workers start to assume that even if they do notice a problem, someone else is either going to fix it or has examined and OKed the current procedure. Workers who speak up and assert that something they noticed actually looks more important than whatever task they were originally assigned to are typically punished rather than rewarded, and fired if they make too much of a fuss because otherwise managerial authority might be diminished. Most firms run internally like a dictatorship, and given Facebook's absurd ownership structure (where there are voting and non-voting shares Zuckerberg retains a majority of the voting shares) it's a recipe for dysfunction.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    This is true but not very interesting. Like literally every large tech company in the entire industry, Facebook has a specialized team of people that work on security --- it has one of the better versions of that team, for what it's worth. Just like ordinary Apple engineers, ordinary Google engineers, ordinary LinkedIn engineers, and ordinary Airbnb engineers, ordinary Facebook engineers don't have an end-to-end picture of how all of security at Facebook works. There's no evidence that there was whistleblowing suppression about this issue anywhere at Facebook, is there?
- vijay_n 8y ago
  What if one among the 2000 was curious ?

code_duck 8y ago

The article indicates it was searchable and used for something by employees, so most of these comments to the effect of ‘they must have been doing this accidentally because Facebook is just so big therefore they are excused’ are invalid. Some group of people did this on purpose and knew it was happening.

chatmasta 8y ago
You're probably being downvoted for speculation, but that sounds completely reasonable to me. At least one person had to have noticed a password in a log file they were viewing at some time. Most people viewing log files know that passwords should not be there. It would trigger alarm bells, and depending on the person, also excitement -- you have somebody's facebook password. It's conceivable that someone then told their friend at work, and a few of these 2,000 developers knew of this secret internal stash of passwords they could access whenever they wanted to "prank" someone on facebook...
- YokoZar 8y ago
  Why would humans be reading these log files?
  - chatmasta 8y ago
    For plenty of reasons, I'm sure. From the article: > My Facebook insider said access logs showed some 2,000 engineers or developers made approximately nine million internal queries for data elements that contained plain text user passwords.
    - YokoZar 8y ago
      That doesn't sound like a human reading the log. It sounds like automation. A script counting the number of successful logins, for instance, could read the same data element that unintentionally contained passwords.
      - 8y ago

rmason 8y ago

Zuck doesn't believe in hiring employees over 30 because they're not 'smart' about tech. Great example why that's a mistake. If he did, someone would have seen that with 10-15 years of corporate experience and would have found that simply unacceptable. They also would have had the gravitas to know how to escalate things to the top and gotten it fixed.