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Faced with leaking internal data or having a broken system, you pretty much always choose the latter. You simply don't leave your front door open. Roll the secr
by bastawhiz 3y ago
Faced with leaking internal data or having a broken system, you pretty much always choose the latter. You simply don't leave your front door open. Roll the secrets, break the system, and then fix the mess.
The system was already broken from the moment credentials were leaked (or if you're a purist, from the moment they were hard coded into a file). The impact just wasn't realized or felt yet.
- bsuvc 3y agoAgreed, 100% I'm definitely not defending it, just saying the red tape in some orgs can be nearly impossible to defeat. This problem should have escalated as high as needed though to bypass the red tape and fix the security issue immediately. Probably a failure of weak middle management not having the guts to communicate the problem up.
- sunnybeetroot 3y agoSoftware isn’t black and white. You weigh the impact of both options.
- bastawhiz 3y agoIf there's a risk of exposing business secrets or user data, no, it's 100% black and white. It's weighing some downtime and/or annoyance against _unbounded risk_. It's unethical at best to choose uptime over revealing user data or the remote access to internal systems which you don't understand the complexity of.
- sunnybeetroot 3y agoI struggle to see when a business responsible for life support services in an industry like medical would choose to end lives over delaying the addressing of a data breach but maybe I’m not seeing the bigger picture?
- bastawhiz 3y ago1. Microsoft isn't in the business of life support systems. Turning off a system with exposed credentials isn't going to shut off all of Azure. Even if it did, are you really claiming that Azure downtime is life-and-death? 2. In what hypothetical universe does a life support system connected to the internet contain a trove of customer PII? And where disconnecting this hypothetical system from the internet _cause the patient it's supporting to die_?
- sunnybeetroot 3y agoI thought the discussion was extending beyond Microsoft and applying to any software. But if you are asking if it’s possible for Microsoft Azure to be the hosting provider for very important systems ie government, medical, then yes, these could impact a high degree of quality of life for people, even now or in the future.
- bastawhiz 3y ago> if it’s possible for Microsoft Azure to be the hosting provider for very important systems ie government, medical, then yes, these could impact a high degree of quality of life for people, even now or in the future. If you design a system that could cause significant personal harm or a meaningful degradation of quality of life for someone due to cloud provider downtime, you're just a bad engineer. There's no such thing as a data center that's failure-proof. If someone's well-being depends on a system, it's simply negligent to be intolerant of failure conditions.
- sunnybeetroot 3y agoI agree, there are many terrible systems around the world with terrible implementations that at best cause inconvenience to people and at worst lead to a loss of life. My point is if you are faced with a data loss you make a call that assesses the impact of downtime and don’t follow a blanket rule.