A security researcher in Germany has been fined €3,000 ($3,300, £2,600) for finding and reporting an e-commerce database vulnerability that was exposing almost 700,000 customer records.
Back in June 2021, according to our pals at
Heise, an contractor identified elsewhere as Hendrik H. was troubleshooting software for a customer of IT services firm Modern Solution GmbH. He discovered that the Modern Solution code made an MySQL connection to a MariaDB database server operated by the vendor. It turned out the password to access that remote server was stored in plain text in the program file MSConnect.exe, and opening it in a simple text editor would reveal the unencrypted hardcoded credential.
With that easy-to-find password in hand, anyone could log into the remote server and access data belonging to not just that one customer of Modern Solution, but data belonging to
all of the vendor's clients stored on that database server. That info is said to have included personal details of those customers' own customers. And we're told that Modern Solution's program files were available for free from the web, so truly anyone could inspect the executables in a text editor for plain-text hardcoded database passwords.
The contractor's findings were discussed in a June 23, 2021
report by Mark Steier, who writes about e-commerce. That same day Modern Solution issued
a statement [PDF] – translated from German – summarizing the incident:
www.theregister.com
