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Web Based Turbo Tax Disclosure Vulnerability Found
Anonymous MPLS Coward writes "Looks like the web-based Turbo Tax was allowing some users to look at other user's tax return information. Reports state that things like bank routing information was available as well as SSNs. Turbo Tax software was unaffected; the bug is in the web-based Turbo Tax service."
Agreed. This is the same kind of crap that I see all of the time from inexperienced developers (especially offshore developers in India). They make all of the classic mistakes, client side javascript for input validation, use of query string parameters with the the SQL command builder on their pages (SQL injections galore), administrative query access to the SQL server directly from the web server, "secret" admin pages, cross-site scripting, you name it and they do it. The problem with a significant portion of the Indian developers is that they are are too busy waving their IIT degree, ISO certs, and other documentation of their extensive education, which taught them everything they needed to know, so they don't need to listen to American devs who have a few lessons left to teach them from school of hard knocks. They suffer from the "not invented here" syndrome, sometimes to an extreme, and thus earn themselves nasty surprises when the attack finally comes and catches them completely flat-footed. The really sad part about all of this is that same types of attacks are used again and again and the same developers keep building vulnerable sites again and again...even long after the attacks are known and proper designs have been presented on many developer forums to avoid these problems (i.e. use stored procedures, limit database permissions to those stored procedures only, don't use the query string for sensitive data, use regular expressions to validate user input data on the server side, etc...)