Hall of shame: Ticketmaster.com

There are many reason why I despise Ticketmaster, such as their ridulous "because we can" fees, "convenience fee for using the website", "fee for printing your own tickets on your own paper, using your own printer, with various ads on it", etc. 

But this series is about security worst practices, so here goes another password FAIL. 

Extra points for having a timer that gives people 90 seconds to fill in the form, come up with a secure password, and read the T.O.S. and privacy policy (each a couple dozen pages).

Hall of shame: Priceline.com

When creating an account, I'm asked for my "preferred internet password". 
Seriously?Sound like marketing-speak for "Go ahead and reuse the password here that you use on facebook and bofa.  We don't mind!".

Shame on you for encouraging bad behaviour!

One extra point for "default opt-in"ing the user to the marketing spam. 

Hall of shame: Mediafire

Let's see:
You have a nice "password strength" meter, but once one submits the form, it repeats back the password in the clear, complains that its too long, and can't have any "special" characters.

Why would that matter, since the password hash would be the same regardless of length? You are securely hashing the passwords, and not storing them in the database as plain-text, right? Right?





Also, can you tell me exactly what the difference is between a special character and a non-special one?  Is it "special" when it causes a SQL Injection vulnerability (which of course you would defense against by properly escaping database inputs), when storing it in the password in plain-text (which of course you don't do) ?

BTW: I don't think I will be trusting you with access to my Facebook account just yet. Hope you don't mind.

Update:
I have proof that they store password "in the clear": The password test is case-insensitive!
You can try this out yourself:
If your password is "joshua", you can log in using "JOSHUA" or "JoSHuA".    This is only possible if the site doesn't use any password hashing at all.   Security 101 FAIL!

"Google Health" on its deathbed

The google giveth and the google taketh away:

Official Google Blog: An update on Google Health and Google PowerMeter:

"we’ve observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people. That’s why we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Google Health service. We’ll continue to operate the Google Health site as usual through January 1, 2012, and we’ll provide an ongoing way for people to download their health data for an additional year beyond that, through January 1, 2013."

This means that my effort of codifying my health history, and keeping track of my workout regime and it's effect will still have a function: To remind me and other early adopters not to put too much trust in new projects, even from the biggest companies.


Now hows that G+ profile building coming along....

New snooping bill: What could possibly go wrong?

House panel approves broadened ISP snooping bill :

"Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year--in case police want to review them in the future--under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.

The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET.

A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored."

Let's think this through (hey, somebody has to!):

•  This is billed as a "protecting children from pornography" act.   Where is the official double-speak justification on this?  What part of this could even theoretically protect any kid from pornography? Did the spin-doctor on duty call in sick?
• This is going to be made available for "police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well".   Are we feeling secure yet?
• Every other monitoring system of this sort has been abused on a systematic basis.  
• Who is going to be paying for this?  I see a $6.99/month "snooped data retention" fee coming to a statement near you soon!
• The ISP is supposed to be capturing credit card numbers, bank account numbers, personal information, which begs questions such as:
• Who is going to be responsible for storing and safeguarding this information?  
• Can you imagine what kind of tasty target it would be for a criminal?  How may credit card transactions are flowing through Comcast's network every day?
• Are the ISPs going to be held to the same data confidentiality laws as everybody else?
  I see PCI, HIPAA and a few others jump out as being applicable here.   Who is going to audit these systems to ensure compliance.
• (Luckily) nearly every website these days uses HTTPS from credit card transactions.  How is an ISP supposed to capture this information on the wire?

There are so many things wrong with this idea, and they haven't even started implementing it yet.