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Didn't realise this was some historic evil script and not some active attacker who could change tack at any moment. That makes the fix pretty easy. Write a
by londons_explore 8mo ago
Didn't realise this was some historic evil script and not some active attacker who could change tack at any moment.
That makes the fix pretty easy. Write a regex to detect the evil script, and revert every page to a historic version without the script.
- jacquesm 8mo agoTrue but it does say something that such a script was able to lie dormant for so long.
- outofpaper 8mo agoWhy would anyone test in production???!!!
- fifilura 8mo agoI have never heard of this kind of insane behaviour before.
- ninth_ant 8mo agoSelecting the wrong environment in your test setup by mistake? I refuse to believe that someone on the security team intentionally tested random user scripts in production on purpose.
- irishcoffee 8mo ago> I refuse to believe that someone on the security team intentionally tested random user scripts in production on purpose. Do I have a bridge to sell you, oh boy
- withinboredom 8mo agoOnce you get big enough… there comes a point where you need to run some code and learn what happens when 100 million people hitting it at once looks like. At that scale, “1 in a million class bugs/race conditions” literally happen every day. You can’t do that on every PR, so you ship it and prepare to roll back if anything even starts to look fishy. Maybe even just roll it out gradually. At least, that’s how it worked at literally every big company I worked at so far. The only reason to hold it back is during testing/review. Once enough humans look at it, you release and watch metrics like a hawk. And yeah, many features were released this way, often gated behind feature flags to control roll out. When I refactored our email system that sent over a billion notifications a month, it was nerve wracking. You can’t unsend an email and it would likely be hundreds of millions sent before we noticed a problem at scale.
- ghxst 8mo agoI would say you can get to this point far below 100 million people, especially on web. Some people are truly special and have some kind of setup you just can't easily reproduce. But I agree, you do really have to be confident in your ability to control rollout / blast radius, monitor and revert if needed.
- ninth_ant 8mo agoYes this is a common release practice. However this is a different situation as we’re talking about running arbitrarily found third-party scripts. I can’t imagine that was ever intended to be done in production. Fun story, when I worked at Facebook in the earlier days someone accidentally made a change that effectively set the release flags for every single feature to be live on production. That was a day… we had to completely wipe out memcached to stop the broken features and then the database was hammered to all hell.
- HoldOnAMinute 8mo agoThere are plenty of ways to safely test in production. For one thing you need to limit the scope of your changes.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 8mo ago"Everyone has a test environment. Some are lucky enough to have a separate production environment."
- jl6 8mo agoLetting ancient evil code run? Have we learned nothing from A Fire Upon the Deep?!
- edoceo 8mo agoI've only just heard of it. But, I already knew to not run random scripts under a privileged account. And thank you for the book suggestion - I'm into those kinds of tales.
- HoldOnAMinute 8mo ago"It was really just humans playing with an old library. It should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library wasn't a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might mean something more, far more, than human)."
- varenc 8mo agoLink to the Prologue of Fire Upon the Deep: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep.htm https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/A_Fire_Upon_the_De... It's very short and from one of my favorite books. Increasingly relevant.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo agoI swear, I respect Vinge more and more based on how well he seems to understand human tendencies to plot some plausible trajectories for our civilization.
- Nition 8mo agoThere's a little throwaway thing in the book (or maybe it was in the prequel) that I always liked, re understanding human tendencies. They're still using Unix time, starting in Jan 1st 1970, but given that their culture is so space-travel-focused they assume the early humans set it to coincide with man's first trip to the moon.
- 8mo ago
- observationist 8mo agoAre you sure? Are you $150 million ARR sure? Are you $150 million ARR, you'd really like to keep your job, you're not going to accidentally leave a hole or blow up something else, sure? I agree, mostly, but I'm also really glad I don't have to put out this fire. Cheering them on from the sidelines, though!
- hinkley 8mo agoHonestly, since I'm never really in a position to see much of that money, at this point I'd be more concerned about my coworkers. And while that typically correlates with the amount of money you either have or receive, they're often out of balance one way or the other.
- Melatonic 8mo agoOr just restore from backup across the board. Assuming they do their backups well this shouldn't be too hard (especially since its currently in Read Only mode which means no new updates)