[HN Gopher] MOVEit body count closes in on 400 orgs, 20M+ indivi...
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       MOVEit body count closes in on 400 orgs, 20M+ individuals
        
       Author : LinuxBender
       Score  : 62 points
       Date   : 2023-07-23 13:52 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
        
       | jeroenhd wrote:
       | > The May 31 bug - a SQL injection vulnerability - was the first.
       | Progress patched this one, tracked as CVE-2023-34362, the next
       | day. A second bug, CVE-2023-35036, came to light on June 9, and
       | was also patched the next day.
       | 
       | > Progress disclosed a third hole, CVE-2023-35708, on June 15.
       | 
       | > Finally (we hope), three additional vulnerabilities -
       | CVE-2023-36934, CVE-2023-36932, and CVE-2023-36933 - were spotted
       | and fixed on July 5.
       | 
       | It seems like fixes came out the same day or the day after the
       | problems were discovered. Yet an estimated 23% of customers are
       | still vulnerable to the recent CVEs.
       | 
       | It seems to me that there's more going on than just shitty
       | security practices by Progress Software, as reported on by this
       | article. The fixes are out, the problems are known, and the fixes
       | are available.
        
       | IronWolve wrote:
       | Over and over, so much middleware software is abandoned due to
       | the high level of customization and expense to replace it.
       | Everyone knows old databases still being kept around, a spaghetti
       | mix of highly configured software packages/vendors nobody wants
       | to touch or pay to get replaced.
       | 
       | And the high expense of contractors to customize and migrate,
       | keeps the legacy tech debt around.
       | 
       | But that is also what keeps an entire industry making money, and
       | many legacy mom/pop shops employed for decades.
        
       | throwaway894345 wrote:
       | SQL injection is super trivial to prevent, right? How are we
       | still falling for this? Is there any compliance audit regime that
       | would catch this (presumably DoE has some pretty strict
       | compliance protocols?), or is all compliance stuff just security
       | theater?
        
         | johntiger1 wrote:
         | Unfortunately with security exploits, you're looking for the
         | weakest link in a chain of X million people. All you need is
         | one careless dev/analyst and you get compromised
        
           | throwaway894345 wrote:
           | That makes sense, but the aerospace industry seems to be able
           | to solve for sloppy devs. Why can't we secure our national
           | infrastructure similarly? (To be clear, I don't think we need
           | aerospace-grade correctness for every piece of DoE software,
           | but surely we can solve for low hanging fruit like "SQL
           | injection attacks")
        
         | Dalewyn wrote:
         | >SQL injection is super trivial to prevent, right? How are we
         | still falling for this?
         | 
         | Because the bug is super trivial to fix, it's also super
         | trivial to do. Not to mention, the human mind is naturally
         | inclined to not care about trivial stuff, which leads to
         | careless mistakes at many levels and thus Bobby Tables dropped
         | out of school.
        
           | dontlaugh wrote:
           | In most environments, it's more effort to interpolate values
           | into queries than to use parameters.
        
             | magicalhippo wrote:
             | Not only more effort, but also the only way in certain
             | cases as not everything supports parameterization. The IN
             | operator for example is one where we fall back to string
             | interpolation, though not directly with user values.
        
             | silon42 wrote:
             | Huh, no?
             | 
             | Tt's very easy to do it incorrectly.
             | 
             | It's at best equal... unless there is some SQL
             | driver/client somewhere that disallows hardcoded strings
             | everywhere (that would actually really help).
        
         | perlgeek wrote:
         | Basically all these file transfer solutions are crap, from a
         | quality and security perspective.
         | 
         | Procurement works by ticking off features of a list, possibly
         | comparing prices. Quality and security are hard to quantify,
         | and often cannot really assessed by the purchase managers
         | themselves, so they don't play a major role in purchasing
         | decisions.
         | 
         | Thus, vendors aren't really incentivized to make robust,
         | reliable and secure software, they are incentivized to sell
         | their software.
        
         | badrabbit wrote:
         | That aside, a WAF would have stopped this.
        
       | brrtbrrt wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | social_quotient wrote:
       | Side note: The use of the term "body count" here is a bit
       | cringey. It's either insensitive to human suffering or bro click
       | bait.
       | 
       | Do others agree or am I being hyperbolic?
        
         | hollerith wrote:
         | I agree.
        
         | Gimpei wrote:
         | I can't see how anyone is harmed by this usage. Seems more
         | hyperbolic to me, or rather obsessive compulsive, which I say
         | as someone who has struggled with OCD in the past. The impulse
         | to constantly monitor and revise the minutiae of language for
         | the slightest whiff of offense seems unhealthy to me, but maybe
         | that's just because of my predispositions.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | paulddraper wrote:
           | Seems unclear.
           | 
           | Did the victims die?
        
         | tekla wrote:
         | Hyperbolic
        
         | pnw wrote:
         | The Register has always had very click bait titles. It's like
         | The Sun but for tech.
        
         | sebazzz wrote:
         | Imagine that some LLM starts to communicate body counts due to
         | these types of writings.
        
         | SkyMarshal wrote:
         | It's not the clearest title, but it's taken directly from the
         | original source who seem to assume the reader has been
         | following their reporting on it and know what it means.
        
         | shrubble wrote:
         | Body count has different connotations depending on context, but
         | in the sense of "compromised information about a person" I have
         | never come across this usage previously.
        
         | mrweasel wrote:
         | Agree, but it's The Register, they've always had a pretty
         | unique and mostly humorous writing style. Not to dissimilar to
         | The Economist, but learning slightly more into the humor.
        
           | adhesive_wombat wrote:
           | It's a riff on British tabloid headlines, which will squeeze
           | a pun, tortured analogy or a breathless overstatement into
           | literally everything. The original clickbait before there
           | were clicks involved.
        
         | thomastjeffery wrote:
         | I was definitely less able to comprehend the title, because it
         | implied a very different context than the actual subject
         | matter.
         | 
         | It would have been much more readable to write "victim count".
        
         | mattnewton wrote:
         | Not hyperbolic, the title is very charged and I had to reread
         | the opening paragraph multiple times to make sure I wasn't
         | missing who died.
        
         | 23B1 wrote:
         | It's safe to say that headlines and headline writers (usually
         | editors) are some of the biggest contributors to the culture
         | wars and all-up dishonesty in modern discourse.
         | 
         | If you think about it, it was inevitable when incentives became
         | more aligned with quick 'hot takes' and volume over
         | signal/noise ratio.
         | 
         | The darkpattern of our times.
        
           | d11z wrote:
           | Especially since many (most?) don't even bother reading past
           | the headline.
        
             | 23B1 wrote:
             | ...and strangely, even quality sites like HN take the given
             | headline instead of the lede. Some subreddits have a way to
             | indicate 'misleading headline' - could be a great feature
             | across all consolidators/curatorial social media.
        
               | Natsu wrote:
               | The mods here do sometimes change sufficiently misleading
               | headlines, but that takes time and getting their
               | attention.
        
               | 23B1 wrote:
               | Which is good, but it almost feels like it should be a UX
               | convention at this point. Of course, that'll be abused as
               | well. Remember eTrust badges? :'D
        
         | projektfu wrote:
         | I read "body count 400+ orgs" and thought that so many
         | companies had been put out of business, didn't notice the
         | individuals part too. Not knowing what MOVEit is, I assumed it
         | was some kind of boycott. Kind of surprised that it meant that
         | 400 organizations and possibly 20 million customers data
         | exposed. Definitely bad wording for the headline.
         | 
         | Of course, it's the Register, they try to be clever with every
         | headline.
        
         | PedroBatista wrote:
         | Are you carefully analyzing a title from the El Reg?
         | 
         | Would you say it's "problematic"? :)
         | 
         | Funny and "cringey" titles are a staple of the Register since
         | the beginning.
        
         | LinuxBender wrote:
         | I read it as another derivation of _victims_ with an emphasis
         | on the human impact. I am just guessing but they probably used
         | that wording as so many sites are hacked every week we probably
         | don 't associate it with the human suffering _in terms of
         | financial, job losses and data leakage leading to more
         | financial losses_ it can cause especially when so many
         | businesses are exposed by a significant vulnerability. I don 't
         | know if Jessica [1] has an account here but their email is
         | listed.
         | 
         | [1] - https://www.theregister.com/Author/Jessica-Lyons-
         | Hardcastle
        
       | darkclouds wrote:
       | > Despite being one of the compromised companies, the TJX
       | spokesperson added: "We do not believe there was any unauthorized
       | access to any customer or associate personal information on TJX's
       | systems or any material impact to TJX."
       | 
       | I love how legislators have upped the ante for (big) businesses
       | to survive, to the point some will appear to perjure themselves
       | in public as the lessor evil. https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/fines-
       | penalties/#:~:text=For%20e....
       | 
       | However, are legislators trying to kill the golden goose, has the
       | money printing exercise called quantitive easing given them an
       | unfounded level of hubris for their central bank purchased
       | national debt?
        
         | ackondro wrote:
         | I'm not saying this is how it happened, but this is why they
         | may be able to say that. When working with similarly sized
         | companies, I am required to encrypt the files (PGP zip) and
         | transmit over a secure encrypted channel (SFTP). Normally,
         | those companies will use a feature of Moveit to automatically
         | do the PGP encryption/decryption.
         | 
         | However, TJX could have written their security policy such that
         | their Moveit server was not allowed to use that feature, so
         | they used a different piece of software to do the
         | encrypt/decrypt outside of Moveit. Thus, hacking the TJX server
         | would only get a bunch of unencrypted reports and encrypted
         | files with personal info in them. Again, I'm not saying this
         | was what actually happened.
        
       | KyleSanderson wrote:
       | The thing that's missing from the article is that they did no
       | security advisory announcement for the July 5th release (they
       | have a mailing list), and instead hid it in a service pack.
       | Overall just terrible behaviour around security.
        
       | nerdchum wrote:
       | Louisianas ENTIRE DMV records were comoromised. Basically the
       | entire state.
       | 
       | Every single aspect of a persons confidential info.
       | 
       | Everything from SSN to eye and hair color.
        
       | cratermoon wrote:
       | Aren't monocultures great? Remember back 20 years ago, when a
       | dumb VBScript macro virus like Melissa or ILOVEYOU could spread
       | across the entire ecosystem in a couple of days?
        
         | formerly_proven wrote:
         | Remember back a few weeks ago, when a single compromised
         | Microsoft key allowed anyone to read everyone's mails?
        
         | h2odragon wrote:
         | or "Code Red" melting down the whole net for a day and a half
         | with propagation traffic
        
       | waihtis wrote:
       | Seems we've finally entered the era people were expecting in late
       | 2020 - i.e. that Russian and US diplomatic ties being vaporized
       | would lead into open mass exploitation of vulnerable US infra
        
         | fullspectrumdev wrote:
         | The Cl0p group have been doing mass exploitation of globally of
         | MFT products for quite a while, MOVEit is just their latest
         | one.
        
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       (page generated 2023-07-23 23:02 UTC)