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How did they manage to store passwords in plain texts. I thought most of the services (wordpress etc) will create passwords for you with a proper encryption?
by jyriand 6y ago
How did they manage to store passwords in plain texts. I thought most of the services (wordpress etc) will create passwords for you with a proper encryption?
- Closi 6y agoThey are a fully managed service for these services, so I'm assuming they store their own set of credentials separately to maintain access.
- lioeters 6y agoThat's what I'm guessing too. Magento and WordPress both store only the hashed passwords in the database; however, a screenshot from the article shows that the hosting company had stored plain-text passwords for an admin user, which were likely generated automatically, and stored in a separate (and publicly accessible) database.
- josefresco 6y agoMy hosting provider (to remain nameless) also offers a global login bypass for WP and it gives me the willies.
- duckmysick 6y agoWhat would be a proper way to handle it?
- part1of2 6y agoThey have access to the DB users. You can craft a new user & password-hash pair and insert it into the DB to create your own Wordpress user to manage on their behalf, or the lazy way is to just update the user’s password hash with your own. Then when you fix the issue, revert it. Worked for me years ago, not sure if something fundamental changed
- dboreham 6y agoImplement a proxy authentication scheme for the hosted services (WP, etc). Now an admin working for the hosting provider can log in using a password checked against a hash stored in their hosting system. No plaintext passwords stored.
- Closi 6y ago> the hosting provider can log in using a password checked Hmm, but where is this password stored? This sounds like exactly what they were doing!
- rograndom 6y agoThere are a few hosting billing system -> account creation products that will generate the login information at purchase time so they can be presented to the user in plain text before being sent over to the provisioned server. It could be being logged accidentally at that point.
- ThePadawan 6y agoThe author points out that these were monitoring logs (and the screenshot looks very much like an Elastic cluster). Thus this could be a missing or misconfigured log filter for PII.
- user5994461 6y agoLooks like they had tasks to run their services like "wordpress --user alice --password 123 --host alice.cloudclusters.com ..." and they systematically logged all the commands with all arguments/settings/variables. Way too verbose logging. Should never have logged that. The logging database (elasticsearch) was exposed to the internet without authentication. Free credentials for all.
- formerly_proven 6y ago> Way too verbose logging. Should never have logged that. It's interesting to observe the contrast between this and "We're a SaaS startup and we log every.single. RPC request across all services forever including performance data".
- user5994461 6y agoYou can log all HTTP requests and it is standard practice to do so at the load balancer level (haproxy and co have very configurable logging). However you MUST NOT logs cookies or headers or content, because these can contain private information. Last but not least, developers should never pass tokens/passwords in the request path because it will be systematically logged and leaked /api/token/abcdec. That should go into a header or the body.
- happy_pancake 6y agoSingle-used tokens are fine to be passed in the path right? Like email verification /token/{token}
- 6y ago
- fogihujy 6y agoLogging of credentials supplied for 1-Click installs comes to mind.