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Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

I think the comment is the context of being a software developer. "Everyone" knows you shouldn't do that, so it would be a bit odd if the company of Facebook's size would. But if it was accidental, then it makes it clearer how it happened. It's still a grave mistake, but not unthinkable. I personally write bugs all the time.

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"Everyone" does not know that. Avoiding plain text passwords is the commonest method used on the Internet, but if you get in to mobile telecoms, you find shared secrets stored in hardware-secure write-only enclaves in clear text. This is actually done because in that specific environment it increases security. It's not a general solution of course, but "only store encrypted passwords" and "only store password hashes" don't always apply either.

I gotta level with you, not everyone knows you shouldn't do that.

There's a number of devs that don't think twice about storing sensitive keys in a git repo.

I could 100% see how someone would do this, see log messages with passwords in plain text, and then faff off being the last person to actually look at those logs. "K, this case is done, what's next"

I worked somewhere not long ago where the "solution" was to run code to scrub repos before building release packages because these packages were in some cases installed in customer networks that drastically increased the chance they might leak. At no point did it seem developers or the devops team realised that the fact they saw the need to do this meant that maybe they should apply the same checks used to scrub in a hook to root them on commit in the first place.

Logging passwords on the fly is probably common. Some debug or log action setup and forgotten.

However, if you ever see a password in plain text you should raise alarms to the highest level.

In this case, I don't think the alarm was raised.

I agree, but also I know of devs that don't understand the basic security implications of passwords being in logs. I could easily see how someone, maybe even a couple of people, could see these logs and think nothing of them.

Vast quantities of logs are never reviewed by anyone....

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