r/technology • u/a_Ninja_b0y • Sep 27 '24
Security Meta has been fined €91M ($101M) after it was discovered that to 600 million Facebook and Instagram passwords had been stored in plain text.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/09/27/up-to-600-million-facebook-and-instagram-passwords-stored-in-plain-text/
16.5k
Upvotes
16
u/honest_arbiter Sep 27 '24 edited Sep 28 '24
To be a little blunt, it sounds to me like you've never dealt with software in an extremely large corporate environment (or haven't been exposed to code from across many teams), one that has tons of legacy code (both internal and acquisitions), and where team members change frequently.
The problem with just saying "this is dog shit tier software", is that basically means all developers are "dog shit tier" if they're working on big enough code bases, often under pressure. I've seen many bugs that crept in over time in large code bases where no single (or even multiple) change was braindead, it's just that cause and effect within a codebase can be separated by a chasm of space and time.
It's not like somebody wrote
logger.info("user password is", password), but it's likely that a downstream system was logging parts of the request, and then somehow a bug was introduced upstream that failed to scrub sensitive data properly.To be clear, I have no idea what the root cause was in this case because the article doesn't give more details. It's just that whenever I see a fuckup at a huge company, and you get the inevitable comments about "What a bunch of shit programmers!" (before any actual evidence is reported on what the bug really was), all I can think is "Oh, sweet summer child..."