[HN Gopher] Zoom Security Exploit: Cracking private meeting pass...
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       Zoom Security Exploit: Cracking private meeting passwords
        
       Author : TomAnthony
       Score  : 227 points
       Date   : 2020-07-29 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.tomanthony.co.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.tomanthony.co.uk)
        
       | ziddoap wrote:
       | >In other testing, I found that Zoom has a maximum password
       | length of 10 characters, and whilst it accepts non-ASCII
       | characters (such as u, EUR, a) it converts them all to ? after
       | you save the password
       | 
       | Maximum password length of 10 chars, and auto-converting non-
       | ASCII to '?' are both extremely egregious password practices..
       | Why does it not surprise me Zoom is doing both. I wonder it they
       | also silently truncate passwords > 10 chars?
       | 
       | These are absolute basics. Let alone not rate limiting and the
       | laundry list of other terrible (lack of) security practices.
        
         | fossuser wrote:
         | They do silently truncate account passwords greater than 32
         | characters, but what's (arguably?) worse is they only do it in
         | some places and not others.
         | 
         | I use 1Password and sometimes when it pastes in it works,
         | sometimes the UI complains the password is longer than 32
         | characters.
         | 
         | I sent them a screen shot on Twitter [0] figuring their US
         | support people would see it, but they didn't seem to care that
         | much (got some generic response).
         | 
         | We just shouldn't be using them:
         | https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html
         | 
         | [0]:
         | https://twitter.com/zachalberico/status/1257910514966908933
        
           | hmhrex wrote:
           | Thanks for linking that essay. It's a good read. I especially
           | liked the Sarah/Exec conversation. Will definitely keep this
           | one saved for later.
        
         | tinus_hn wrote:
         | Do Chinese people not use Chinese characters in their
         | passwords?
        
           | yorwba wrote:
           | Entering Chinese characters requires using an input method
           | engine that turns keyboard input into a list of candidate
           | words from which the user picks the correct one. If you used
           | that method to enter a password, shoulder surfing would be
           | trivial. I think it's usually automatically disabled for
           | password input fields.
        
             | ladberg wrote:
             | Additionally, there are other methods like Zhuyin that some
             | people (typically the older generation that used computers
             | before contextual dropdowns) use. I _believe_ those keys
             | just map 1-1 with American keyboards so they would just
             | type the keycodes for Chinese characters and ASCII is
             | inputted into the password field, but correct me if I 'm
             | wrong.
        
       | techntoke wrote:
       | Why public education continues to use Zoom is beyond me. Not only
       | do they use Zoom, they spend upwards of $10/mo per student for
       | it. For that price you get the entire G Suite platform.
        
         | Figs wrote:
         | We tried using Google Meet for work meetings at my university.
         | The experience SUCKED compared to Zoom. There were serious
         | problems like taking 30 seconds to a minute for the screen
         | share widget to popup after clicking the button in Firefox! It
         | was, frankly, unusable for us.
         | 
         | We also tried self-hosting Jitsi, and while that kind of
         | worked, we had some problems getting everyone to be able to
         | connect to it and send/receive audio. It went on the backburner
         | of things to look into more later.
         | 
         | Zoom has a lot of problems, clearly, but it solved THE most
         | important issue: we can actually communicate successfully with
         | it -- as in _right now_ with minimal additional effort. That 's
         | why it won.
        
           | sm4rk0 wrote:
           | Time to learn that _minimal additional effort_ != _best
           | solution_.
           | 
           | When you drink a soda, minimal additional effort is to throw
           | the can away, but if you think about consequences you'll
           | probably make some additional effort and recycle it.
        
         | reaperducer wrote:
         | _Why public education continues to use Zoom is beyond me_
         | 
         | Some schools and states have banned Zoom. I think New York's
         | educational system is one.
        
       | twostorytower wrote:
       | My org was forced to switch from Zoom to Microsoft Teams and it's
       | become quite apparent Microsoft has a long way to go to catch up.
       | There are small things Zoom did that enhanced meetings that you
       | never even knew or thought about as a user until switching to
       | something else. For example, noise filtering. Zoom has active
       | noise filtering which gets rid of small background noise (like
       | typing or computer fans). Microsoft Teams does not have this, and
       | every meeting with more than a couple people has unbearable
       | background noise and everyone has to be on mute if they're not
       | talking.
       | 
       | We're now looking into an enterprise license for Krisp.ai just to
       | remedy this. I am not sure how a trillion dollar company like
       | Microsoft hasn't been able to figure this out yet. Maybe they'll
       | buy a startup like Krisp just to fix it. But hey...at least it's
       | more secure.
        
         | tech234a wrote:
         | Discord actually just partnered with Krisp.ai to bring the
         | feature to their app too.
        
         | TomAnthony wrote:
         | Yeah, Zoom works very well, and is so much better for video
         | calls than most of the alternatives.
         | 
         | I do have sympathy for their team who were suddenly getting a
         | wild amount more traffic, and scrutiny. They have scaled fast
         | and kept the platform up and stable, which is impressive.
        
         | avh02 wrote:
         | On the flipside (just an anecdote, not making any points), we
         | had a hard time turning this noise filtering consistently off
         | for a colleague of ours who speaks without a voice box.
         | 
         | He kept getting filtered out randomly and we couldn't
         | understand him because of the feature. It was (at the time)
         | turning back on without his knowledge. We eventually got it
         | consistently turned off with one of our zoom admins' help.
         | 
         | We get a lot of background noise from him but his voice is more
         | valuable there.
        
       | user5994461 wrote:
       | I really hope they just extend the password to 8 upper letters
       | (200 billion combinations) or 10 digits.
       | 
       | If they go for a longer and alphanumeric password as it seems
       | they are doing, I am gonna dread having to enter that manually
       | whenever joining a meeting, all because an hypothetically
       | attacker might join in. Might as well switch back to webex for
       | usability.
        
       | coldcode wrote:
       | My employer just switched to Zoom (yesterday was my first zoom
       | meeting) and I wondered why we were switching to a company with
       | such lame security.
        
       | wolco wrote:
       | checked 91k passwords in 25 minutes.
       | 
       | 250 minutes to crack any password?
       | 
       | Meeting will be over before this happens.
        
         | dx87 wrote:
         | You missed the part where he said that you could just throw
         | more servers at the bruteforce and drastically cut the time
         | required.
        
         | andykx wrote:
         | It won't necessarily take that long though. That is an upper
         | limit.
        
         | black3r wrote:
         | On a single machine with 100 threads. But imagine what NSA (or
         | any other relevant intelligence agency) can do for listening
         | into some foreign government's meetings like the UK one in
         | example. Or what huge corporates can do for corporate
         | espionage.
        
         | marksomnian wrote:
         | That's on just one computer. Depending on how many servers
         | (read: how much in AWS credits) you have access to, you could
         | parallelise it nearly infinitely.
        
         | eat_veggies wrote:
         | This attack horizontally scales really well, and you don't have
         | to try all 1 million passwords in the average case
        
         | d4mi3n wrote:
         | Don't forget that many recurring meetings reuse the same
         | password.
        
           | tinus_hn wrote:
           | If you can choose the password, people will also use
           | passwords they use for other things.
        
             | d4mi3n wrote:
             | I agree, but the point I'm trying to make is that the time
             | to guess the password isn't too big of an issue for
             | passwords that never change. Ideally, Zoom would generate a
             | password for each instance of a meeting.
             | 
             | Failing that, having some better factor for authentication
             | (known email or number for a given company's Zoom setup)
             | would make it harder to get in simply by guessing a short
             | password.
        
         | ptasker wrote:
         | I would imagine using a GPU compute instance would bring this
         | time down significantly.
        
           | eat_veggies wrote:
           | It's network bound, not compute bound. A GPU wouldn't really
           | help in this case.
        
         | TomAnthony wrote:
         | OP here.
         | 
         | I tested much higher rates for short bursts, and wasn't ever
         | rate limited, but didn't want to risk blowing anything up.
         | However, with a few AWS instances / lambdas it would have been
         | possible to do it in a few mins.
         | 
         | Secondly, and more importantly, I found a variant (mentioned in
         | the article) that allowed me to do this before meetings
         | started, so you could have the password in advance.
        
       | sillysaurusx wrote:
       | It seems like one way to mitigate security vulnerabilities is to
       | write software that looks for statistical anomalies. Attempting 1
       | million passwords in 28 minutes is such an obvious outlier that
       | it's strange we have to guard against it explicitly.
       | 
       | It would also catch cheats in video games, for example, since
       | those are statistical outliers too.
       | 
       | Is there a name for this kind of program?
        
         | caiobegotti wrote:
         | Even a really crude monitoring metric would trigger alerts
         | after a bunch of recurring calls to an endpoint from a specific
         | place. They simple don't care at all or are too dumb to come up
         | with basic security checks.
        
           | nitrogen wrote:
           | Until it's a default in frameworks like Spring Boot and in
           | ELK stack logging systems, in most places it's not happening.
        
           | wdb wrote:
           | Got any examples of such monitoring metric setup? Would love
           | to get an idea what it's good to monitor :)
           | 
           | I am thinking of using Grafana with Prometheus. Love to find
           | a nice resource with good ideas of rules/monitoring to have
        
             | caiobegotti wrote:
             | That's exactly what I do (or would) use and it does plenty
             | for many type of business and it scales up well. The
             | metrics specifically depend on the rest of your stack
             | though but these days any API gateway or ingress
             | application or service mesh or proxy app can provide
             | endpoints metrics for you nearly out-of-the-box.
        
         | boarnoah wrote:
         | Valve has an interesting talk about this with respect to VAC
         | [1]. Which like you suggest relies heavily on statistical
         | evidence from multiple replays in order to detect cheats.
         | 
         | In CSGO's case they test it against their existing system
         | Overwatch which uses player moderators to detect cheats). With
         | their other big title dota as far as I'm aware its fully
         | automated.
         | 
         | 1 - "GDC 2018: John McDonald (Valve) - Using Deep Learning to
         | Combat Cheating in CSGO" -
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc
        
         | eat_veggies wrote:
         | Yep, it's called novelty and outlier detection. The sklearn
         | page is pretty informative:
         | 
         | https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/outlier_detection.ht...
        
       | black3r wrote:
       | Rate limiting login attempts is a basic security principle that's
       | both easy to implement and not overly intrusive. This once again
       | confirms that Zoom just doesn't care about having a secure
       | platform at all.
        
         | mcherm wrote:
         | > This once again confirms that Zoom just doesn't care about
         | having a secure platform at all.
         | 
         | I disagree. I think it shows that Zoom (at the time this was
         | created) lacked the skill necessary to create a secure
         | platform. But their prompt reaction and subsequent focus on
         | security has given me hope.
        
           | ziddoap wrote:
           | > 9th April - Heard from the Zoom team that this was
           | mitigated.
           | 
           | > 16th April - Heard they were working on updated bug bounty
           | program.
           | 
           | > 15th June - Requested update on BB program. No reply.
           | 
           | > 8th July - Asked again if I could submit this for bounty.
           | No reply.
           | 
           | > 29th July - Disclosure.
           | 
           | Prompt?
           | 
           | > Maximum password length of 10
           | 
           | Increased focus on security?
        
             | hungryhobo wrote:
             | not sure if you've actually read the article
        
               | ziddoap wrote:
               | Feel free to elaborate?
        
               | pvtmert wrote:
               | I think he meant that they somehow mitigated problem in
               | 10 days wheras haven't paid (ghosted) author for
               | months...
        
           | cosmodisk wrote:
           | I thin theyve been big enough long enough to have a guy or
           | two who could look at the functionality or even the codebase
           | and say: ' hold on a minute,how on earth we are doing this'.
        
             | nitrogen wrote:
             | It's pretty freaking hard to convince a PM to care about
             | security. For that matter it's pretty hard to convince most
             | engineers, let alone companies, even after a hack. Imagine
             | yourself talking to the general counsel after an
             | elasticsearch db gets hacked about ethical obligations to
             | make customers whole. Then imagine that GC saying literally
             | "ethics? It's not like we're building bridges here".
        
               | ziddoap wrote:
               | If a website stores passwords in cleartext instead of
               | hashes, would you have the same response?
               | 
               | This isn't fancy stuff. This doesn't require tens of
               | thousands of dollars in code-audits or pentests to come
               | to light. It's literally the absolute basics of password
               | management. There should be no need to "convince a PM".
               | 
               | Rate limiting, not silently truncating passwords, not
               | setting an extremely low and arbitrary maximum on
               | password length... All of this stuff is as basic as
               | hashing a password.
        
               | nitrogen wrote:
               | I'm saying I've been in exactly that position in many
               | companies. Spent all of my social capital to get password
               | hashes fixed, or a hacked DB audited, or circuit
               | breakers, or rate limits, alerts, admin and monitoring
               | tools, etc. It's really easy to preach here on HN. Saying
               | it's an uphill battle "out there" is a drastic
               | understatement.
        
               | ziddoap wrote:
               | I get where you're coming from, I do these types of
               | engagements often. I just wanted to highlight the
               | difference between "Please spend $25,000 on this pentest
               | engagement" and "Don't set a maximum password length of
               | 10" or "Don't set the default password to be 6 digits".
               | 
               | One is an investment and requires convincing a PM or
               | C-Suite. The other two are some of the most basic
               | concepts possible (literally first semester, if not first
               | week of CS) in the design of anything that has to do with
               | a password.
        
               | nitrogen wrote:
               | _The other two are some of the most basic concepts
               | possible (literally first semester, if not first week of
               | CS) in the design of anything that has to do with a
               | password._
               | 
               | There are still ways this can fail: e.g. tech lead on a
               | team full of good but uninformed bootcamp devs with an
               | absentee manager and a domineering PM, run as a democracy
               | when only a minority have (formal or self-taught) CS
               | education. If the PM doesn't like your recommendation
               | they'll get one of the bootcampers to do a crappy job
               | without telling you.
        
           | black3r wrote:
           | According to wikipedia Zoom was founded in 2011, has 2000+
           | employees and had revenue of 600M last year. I somehow doubt
           | that if they cared, it would be a problem for them to hire a
           | security consultant (internal or external) and perform some
           | pentests and I believe any professional pentester would find
           | stuff like this AND their previous security mishaps (their
           | definition of "end-to-end encryption", mac app backdoors,
           | etc...)
        
             | haecceity wrote:
             | The history of computers seems tell us that people don't
             | care about security until they're compelled to.
        
         | unsignedchar wrote:
         | Their success seems to demonstrate that they were right to
         | prioritize functionality over security.
        
           | markovbot wrote:
           | No, it does not. It demonstrates that they were successful at
           | getting a lot of people to install their dangerous software
        
             | dopamean wrote:
             | If you measure success by installs then they were
             | successful.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | xtracto wrote:
       | Reminded me of the time when it was possible to brute-force a
       | Hotmail password brute-forcing via the Windows Messenger client
       | connections
        
       | AnonHP wrote:
       | I can't stand the thought of using Zoom after all the seemingly
       | endless issues on security and privacy (and now this new issue
       | with not paying a bug bounty).
       | 
       | For what might probably be a millionth time, what are the best
       | alternatives (preferably free or easily self-hostable or priced
       | low) for occasional calls of the following types:
       | 
       | 1. Video calls with some people (say about 10 people max.). The
       | free Jitsi Meet seems good for this.
       | 
       | 2. Webinar platform where there are clear distinctions between a
       | presenter and participants, and the presenter chooses what's
       | visible at any point in time (video feed from camera or some
       | file/presentation/screen sharing) and has control over recording
       | the session.
       | 
       | 3. Same as #2 but with two presenters on camera (different
       | physical locations) switching back and forth (either as the main
       | view or with the active presenter on the main view and the other
       | in a smaller corner window).
        
       | Naac wrote:
       | > 9th April - Heard from the Zoom team that this was mitigated.
       | 
       | > 16th April - Heard they were working on updated bug bounty
       | program.
       | 
       | > 15th June - Requested update on BB program. No reply.
       | 
       | > 8th July - Asked again if I could submit this for bounty. No
       | reply.
       | 
       | > 29th July - Disclosure.
       | 
       | That's disappointing that Zoom never got back to you regarding
       | the bounty.
        
         | tito wrote:
         | Gut check here on Zoom customer service. Has anyone heard from
         | them in the last 2 months? I've been on a pro plan and 10-seat
         | plan and had 2 issues about events sent to their customer
         | service starting June 3rd. Have not heard back anything besides
         | regular "we're moving slow because of COVID 19" template
         | updates". They used to be responsive, even had a "chat" feature
         | but now that's disabled.
        
           | mystcb wrote:
           | I am going to raise my hands and say I have heard from them.
           | I logged a support request on March 24th (the day the UK went
           | into lockdown, so I was already expecting a delay). I finally
           | got a response back on July 20th. It is a shame they are
           | slow, as they have been really responsive in the past.
           | 
           | Hope that helps set a bit of a benchmark!
        
         | cs02rm0 wrote:
         | Bug bounties seem to be a complete wild west.
         | 
         | I've reached the point of assuming the odds are stacked so
         | heavily that, from a purely financial perspective, it's not
         | worth the investment just to report an issue let alone find it.
        
       | rkagerer wrote:
       | It's unconscionable they still hadn't implemented any sort of
       | rate limiting.
       | 
       | It should have been there from day one. For the protection of
       | their customers, and their own infrastructure. After the string
       | of "zoombombings", it should have been a top priority and
       | received ongoing attention from their CEO until implemented.
       | 
       | When I began using the platform, I assumed the randomly generated
       | meeting numbers were buttressed by adequate account and
       | connection attempt monitoring on their back end to make them
       | "secure enough". After finding reason to suspect otherwise 5
       | months ago, I contacted Zoom about it twice and never received a
       | response (from what I can tell support is overwhelmed and tickets
       | even for serious issues like security breaches and billing errors
       | can take _months_ to hit human eyes).
       | 
       | The password-in-the-link approach felt to me like security
       | theatre. Yes, it adds value, but really doesn't amount to
       | anything more than a bit of additional URL obfuscation
       | (particularly given the length and character limitations), unless
       | you're distributing passwords separately - which can be onerous
       | for attendees.
       | 
       | Hats off to this researcher for forcing the issue and finally
       | incentivizing the company to work on cleaning up their act. But
       | it makes me worry about where else in their platform they took
       | shortcuts. They've really nailed the "frictionless" part (and I
       | commend them for that) but I'm convinced you can achieve a
       | friendly user experience while still maintaining a basic level of
       | security.
        
       | caiobegotti wrote:
       | Reading the whole story it makes me believe Zoom has really poor
       | securities practices all across their board. Even basic stuff.
       | Incredible.
        
       | netsectoday wrote:
       | I believe Zoom's continued struggle represents the state of
       | software development in 2020.
       | 
       | 1. Are you a software engineer?
       | 
       | 2. How many "security" tickets have you been assigned in your
       | career?
       | 
       | 3. Has your employer ever paid for security training for you?
       | (and I'm not talking about annoying powerpoint websites that
       | teach you how to identify phishing emails)
       | 
       | 4. Has your organization ever run a blue team / red team
       | exercise?
       | 
       | 5. Who is in charge of APPLICATION SECURITY at your company? (Not
       | network security, or database security, but actual APPLICATION
       | level vulns)
       | 
       | 6. Does your organization scan for outdated dependencies? (Do you
       | uncover CVEs in your software on your own, or do you check how
       | bad things are when the news tells you something big happened and
       | might be in your stack?)
       | 
       | 7. Are you running a web application, and have you implemented
       | ANY security headers?
       | 
       | 8. Did your business unit mandate that "we support all browsers",
       | so they still have you running on TLS v1.1? (who tf knows, or
       | cares, am I right?)
       | 
       | 9. Do you use the software you built? (Is your personal
       | information in the database, along with legitimate usage stats,
       | and possibly sensitive information you'd like to protect, or do
       | you just write the code and deploy into the void?)
       | 
       | 10. Do you have access to the production systems or database?
       | (Most likely the answer is NO, so you wouldn't know about brute-
       | force attacks, invalid requests, corrupted data, or other
       | anomalies the developers should have their eyes on).
       | 
       | My diagnosis; the profession of software development is a victim
       | of a hostile takeover from product managers, while pushing
       | engineers out of control of their domain.
       | 
       | My recommendation; use the least amount of software you can get
       | by with, and assume it's compromised.
        
         | pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
         | You forgot the key word: modern.
         | 
         | %s/software/modern &/g
         | 
         | In 2020, you are an "engineer" writing "modern" software.
         | 
         | Don't forget the "updates"!
        
         | Bnshsysjab wrote:
         | 11. Do you audit third party libraries for security, malicious
         | intent, and longevity?
        
           | hinkley wrote:
           | 11.a: Do you even know if the libraries you are shipping are
           | the official versions?
        
           | dathinab wrote:
           | I try do so. But non properly, i.e. I at least skim third
           | party libraries as long as viable.
           | 
           | I have more then one time stumbled about some "wtf is this"
           | thing in libraries which seem to be very good/well
           | maintained/etc.
           | 
           | Things included:
           | 
           | - Setting socket options which are both unnecessary and cause
           | bugs (like non blocking flag on a socket which is used as if
           | in blocking mode without having non-blocking support in that
           | library).
           | 
           | - Not properly clearing secrets while advertising to do so.
           | (I.e. writing zeros without using volatile write or similar,
           | not supper will known but authors of hashing libs can be
           | expected to know better).
           | 
           | - Less obvious Memory leaks.
           | 
           | - Major logic flaws in the application logic which should
           | easily have been cough by tests, except that the tests didn't
           | really test anything. (Through ironically not security
           | flaws.)
           | 
           | - Libraries pretending to support X but only correctly
           | support that common special limited usage of X while having
           | code for full X support but all buggy and 100% unusable
           | outside of the common special case.
           | 
           | - EDIT: Fundamental design flaws in supposedly state of the
           | art, supper fast, supper reliable web framework which makes
           | it not so fast and not so reliable in many real work use-
           | cases under load.
           | 
           | - etc.
           | 
           | It's sometimes really sad.
        
             | Bnshsysjab wrote:
             | I would love to see public code reviews of open source
             | projects to highlight this kind of stuff but actually
             | having a community driven effort requires a central vendor
             | to support it cleanly. GitHub/gitlab: I'm looking at you.
        
         | d4mi3n wrote:
         | You touch on another important issue I don't see a lot of
         | discussion about: There is a HUGE demand for application
         | security engineers, or more broadly, security folks with
         | software engineering backgrounds.
         | 
         | I'm in SecEng and was laid off when my company's regional
         | office went under. It's become pretty obvious to me that
         | there's a huge need for security minded engineers, and most
         | applicants companies get for "Application Security Engineer"
         | roles don't have any experience or background as SWEs.
         | 
         | I'm of the opinion that the industry needs to do a few things
         | to help get traction on the problem:
         | 
         | 1. Open up career paths that allow SWEs to move from product
         | develop to technical security 2. Have companies better
         | advertise their need for skilled technical security talent 3.
         | Have InfoSec teams perform more cross team exercises. I've
         | never met an engineer who wasn't all for participating in a
         | red/blue team exercise. It's a fantastic way to cross-train and
         | raise awareness.
        
         | cmeacham98 wrote:
         | > (Most likely the answer is NO, so you wouldn't know about
         | brute-force attacks, invalid requests, corrupted data, or other
         | anomalies the developers should have their eyes on).
         | 
         | I would be much more worried about security if the developers
         | had access to the production environment than if they didn't.
        
           | alasdair_ wrote:
           | I once worked for a fortune 500 that blocked all but a few
           | unix sysadmins from executing shell commands on prod servers.
           | 
           | So far, so good.
           | 
           | The issue was that the "sysadmins" knew almost nothing about
           | how anything worked, so the procedure was that the devs would
           | give them commands to type and they would just type them in
           | to a terminal.
           | 
           | Of course, if anything went wrong, or was ambiguous, the dev
           | would need to check on it, and would end up standing next to
           | the "sysadmin"'s desk and just telling them which characters
           | to type. I once had to explain what a pipe character was...
           | 
           | Anyway, the end result was that all of the devs had prod
           | access, they just had a very slow interface to it.
        
             | pvtmert wrote:
             | I'm system engineer in a decent company. I wish devs could
             | access to prod systems so they have to get to cleanup their
             | mess / get responsible for actions they do...
             | 
             | They already have access to staging and preprod what they
             | do is basically coming to me and saying 'it did run well on
             | their macos machine'
             | 
             | There are outliers, some few good people and some random
             | people having no idea what they are doing.
             | 
             | IMHO there should be random quiz/task/test each day you
             | login. Something obvious but not trivial at the same time
             | related with domain of the system. So you would get 24h
             | access if you pass, get denied for 3 hours if fail. 3
             | questions in each session...
             | 
             | At least people might learn something out of requirement...
        
             | henryfjordan wrote:
             | > Anyway, the end result was that all of the devs had prod
             | access, they just had a very slow interface to it.
             | 
             | They also had a person who could see if the dev was
             | stalking an ex-girlfriend or pilfering bank account info.
             | Sounds perfect.
        
             | caiobegotti wrote:
             | HSBC production support used to be pretty much exactly like
             | that during rollouts (no idea if that has changed in the
             | last 5 years).
        
         | ziddoap wrote:
         | I fully agree with your sentiment, but the specific issues
         | discussed here (having a maximum password length of 10,
         | silently truncating passwords, silently replacing non-ASCII
         | with '?', setting default passwords to 6 numbers, not rate-
         | limiting password attempts) are not things that require a red
         | team / blue team to figure out. They aren't things that require
         | scanning dependencies, auditing source-code, etc.
         | 
         | These should be as basic as not storing cleartext passwords.
        
           | FabHK wrote:
           | Agreed. Yes, the state of InfoSec is bad in most companies,
           | but with Zoom it is really abysmal. World class super bad.
        
           | dathinab wrote:
           | > having a maximum password length of 10, silently truncating
           | passwords, silently replacing non-ASCII with '?', setting
           | default passwords to 6 numbers, not rate-limiting password
           | attempts
           | 
           | Most newly CS students would know better then to do this or
           | at least would know they have to properly look this up.
           | 
           | It's sometimes hard to believe major stupid things like this
           | are done accidentally. (But I know very well how they happen
           | accidentally, it starts with some bug somewhere with non-us-
           | ASCII/to long and similar, then it's constrained "temporary"
           | and put on a must fix list but that list never gets any
           | priority ever, things like this are sadly supper common. As
           | long as companies don't get legally hold responsible for
           | negligence this won't ever go away.)
        
           | mac-chaffee wrote:
           | I'm just imagining each of those individual issues sitting at
           | the bottom of a Jira backlog.
           | 
           | One thing that causes them to be prioritized where I work is
           | that if they come up during a yearly review, you can't ship
           | your app. Overriding that "stop-ship" order requires C-level
           | approval. Because without a specific exploit, it might be
           | hard to convince a PM to move those up in the backlog.
        
         | dec0dedab0de wrote:
         | 11. Do you think exploits are cool? Do you keep up to date on
         | types of exploits, at least at a high level, just because you
         | want to know about them?
        
           | pnine wrote:
           | I'm a front end engineer. I go to Defcon, i read CVEs and
           | exploit news. It's a hobby but I feel like it also helps to
           | bring a different perspective into the application world
           | because my peers don't seem to care much.
        
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