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Comment by tastysandwich | Hacker News Reader

As a software engineer even I sometimes can't help romanticising hacking in my imagination. But so many times it turns out to be just like some company left the front gate wide open and the "hacker" walked in and took a look around.

Eg when an airline had a public API where you could get someone's passport number and details just from their boarding pass https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minis...

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Private keys checked into code?

Password salts that were identical for the entire set?

"Random" initialization vectors always created from the same prng seed?

Without coders like these, hackers would really have to work for it.

(And, yes, I've encountered all of these in my career.)

> Eg when an airline had a public API where you could get someone's passport number and details just from their boarding pass https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minis...

Underneath all the garbage, good story. But Holy Hell, why do bloggers write so terribly and self-indulgently? That's a half hour of my life I'll never get back that shouldn't have been more than 10 minutes. Don't they have Ritalin in Australia? They really should.

Aussie, can confirm. They have Vyvanse, Dexamfetamine, Adderal and Ritalin. I didn't mind reading this one though, was a novel change to see sentences starting without capital letters.

You could just say you don't prefer the writing style.

They did, in their own writing style that you don't prefer!

Check this out if you haven't heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

Ha! Loved the linked story. Thanks for posting.

Less hacking, more like exploring.

Since when are passport numbers supposed to be sensitive information? This isn't something you could use for identity fraud in any normal circumstances.

Don't all sorts of person-related details come in handy to stage a social engineering hack? Maybe a caller could demonstrate legitimacy by coughing up a passport number. At this point, it may impress me more than someone having found my SSN (_love you for that, Equifax_). Yet, SSN is still by many institutions considered something that should be stored in the vault.

>Don't all sorts of person-related details come in handy to stage a social engineering hack?

Maybe? But also maybe not really?

Passport numbers change very frequently, nobody uses them to identify people.

I don't know if you are joking or I need to break it to you that in most cases passports are the de facto identification for foreigners and passport S/Ns are being used as part of identification procedures.

> I don't know if you are joking or I need to break it to you that in most cases passports are the de facto identification for foreigners

As a perpetual foreigner I've never had to use my passport number for identification.

>passport S/Ns are being used as part of identification procedures.

Where?

In the US there are basically 2 forms of ID cards currently, one says “Federal Limits Apply”, the other does not. The one that says “Federal Limits Apply” requires a backup identity document to verify in some cases like buying a gun, or flying. Passports are often used, and while the TSA is going to verify the info on the passport, others likely will just verify if it looks real enough or check that the number actually exists and go no further.

They change frequently? My passport is the longest-lifetime form of ID I'm offered, the absurdity of using Social Security Number as an ID aside. Most passports last for 5-10 years in my experience, and I'm not sure the number changes when you renew it.

> I'm not sure the number changes when you renew it.

Of course it does. Numbers used to identify people generally don't. Passport number identifies the individual document, mostly so it can be checked against INTERPOL's SLTD database.

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