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> Software engineers are trained to view these kinds of things as bugs Competent engineers —software or other— must have an education in safety standards and l
by oliwarner 2y ago
> Software engineers are trained to view these kinds of things as bugs
Competent engineers —software or other— must have an education in safety standards and legal regulations. I had a pretty formal education in data protection at both A-Level and undergrad. I know real engineers get tetchy about us programmers edging in, so if you want any claim to an engineering title, ignoring the ramifications of your code in the real world is unacceptable.
But that doesn't seem to be the problem here. Somebody did know it was bad, did fix it urgently, did report it internally and did an impact assessment. The problem was they needed to notify the regulator earlier so they knew it could have been a problem.
If these passwords were in the wild, delaying notification by however many days means attackers have more time to use stolen credentials. $100m sounds like a lot but a lot of these regulatory rules scale with the company so that punishments like this have impact. They need to improve how they handle security notification.
- bcrl 2y agoI think the big difference is that engineers have had to care about people dying for the past 100 years. Today there are software developers that throw code out into the world that kills people without any repercussions. At some point this needs to change.
- bigtimesink 2y agoAn education in legal regulations teaches you the best solution is to make the fix and don't say anything.