One of our members informed us a couple of days ago that due to a strange combination of actions and circumstances, he hit a flaw in our login system that enabled him to access the membership of another member with a similar name.
Of course we promptly investigated; the problem has been permanently fixed.
After that, we turned our attention to finding out if that particular flaw had been exploited in any other cases. It does have a very distinctive pattern, part of which is failing to log in as the first person, successfully logging in as the second person, and then “reappearing” as the first person. (That’s sufficient “signature” to detect it in our records, but there’s actually more internally required for it to happen — related to cookies and PHP session handling.) We’ve been over the logs back to the point where the problem was introduced and we’re happy to report that we were not able to find any previous similar incidents. So, if you needed any reassurance that most people are basically good, the first person to find this problem reported it to us within minutes.
Obviously the person who did this is aware of it, and we have already notified the person affected. So if you haven’t already heard from us about this, it doesn’t affect you and you don’t need to take any steps. We are posting this anyway simply because it’s security related. Security is our top priority; it’s the foundation upon which the rest of our service has to be built. So, as transparent and forthright as we try to be when we have service problems and downtime, I feel we need to be twice as forthcoming when we have problems like these, however small.
I also feel it’s appropriate to personally apologize to all of our members because this was a security problem and it was caused by a coding error introduced by me. This is an area where only perfection is acceptable; falling short even a little bit is not. I’m sorry, and I will work hard to keep it from happening again.
(Ironically, we are already developing a new certificate-based backend that is so secure, the goal is to open-source our entire UI when it is complete.)
