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Memo Details Gawker Security Strategy
Trailrunner7 writes "After a hack of systems belonging to online publishing giant Gawker Media that yielded more than one million passwords, the online media company's chief technology officer has announced new defense strategies aimed at placating their users and preventing further humiliating data breaches. Thomas Plunkett issued a company-wide memo on Friday that lays out the new security measures and suggests the company overlooked security concerns in the rush to develop new features."
I've been dying to know whether the no-name CTO of some joke of a blog franchise has had any thoughts since his incompetence was made public.
I, for one, will be eagerly perusing his recommendations to see if there's anything I've missed.
Plunkett should be sacked because he is ultimately responsible for his team.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
In recent weeks, intruders were able to gain access to our web servers by exploiting a vulnerability in our source code, allowing them to gain access to user data and passwords.
They are still blaming bugs in code. Pretending to be mistakes made by low level programming flunkies. The problem was using an unsalted hash that allowed them to do a simple dictionary attack. Further even the top guys were using very simple passwords. Used the same password for multiple accounts. Continued to leave other accounts and usernames unlocked even after knowing one account using that password has been compromised.
No. The real problem was that the managers and the top dogs drawing top salaries were clueless idiots. Pretending that it was some kind of stupid bug left in code by some low level programmer shows how disconnected these bozos are from reality.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Posting anonymously because my email was in the leaked info.
Lifehacker has some useful tips; Linux, Mac and Windows. Including their mobile variants and smartphones.
Gizmodo is another, which I used to read often but I got sick of reading so many commercials (that's the idea of the site, they didn't do anything wrong).
Give them a look over. At the bottom of Lifehacker.com pages there are links to the other sites (fleshbot.com is missing, maybe because it's NSFW).
They are a giant precisely because they are the force behind a fairly diverse range of sites, all of which are big names in their respective fields. You may not have heard the name 'Gawker Media', and I don't expect valleywag or Jezebel to come up on most Slashdotters' daily rotation, but Gizmodo gets linked here (either in stories or comments) fairly regularly.
There's a good chance you've been to one of their sites before. Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, and io9 are their bigger ones I can recall -- I'm sure there are others. I personally read Gizmodo and io9 quite often, though I've never made an account with them.