TechCrunch stores user passwords in plain text

15 points by codingninja 8 years ago | 6 comments

I tried to signup for TechCrunch Disrupt to pitch our VC funded predictive analytics platform that uses heuristics and ML to find what is driving users to convert and identifies potential changes you can make to your website to drive conversion growth and got a very silly SQL error that showed them inserting my password in plain text!

(error code 22001) SQLSTATE[22001]: [Microsoft][ODBC Driver 13 for SQL Server][SQL Server]String or binary data would be truncated. (SQL: insert into [battle_users] ([userEmail], [userPassword], [activationCode], [isFastTrack], [event_id]) values (david@retroanalytics.io, aQojvBPZK9ZXcJw49dK{oeF6GRDm4E)(T4XMQrCN]c,$Vj86470V242wu&mbsCf*;L2Q, 0, 138, ?))

Simply enter a long password on https://battlefieldaustralia.techcrunch.com/auth/register to receive the error yourself

CM30 8 years ago |

Damn, that seems pretty bad. That said, could this be a problem with the Startup Battlefield mini site or do you think it's common practice across TechCrunch as a whole?

Part of me cynically thinks the latter, but another part of me thinks a lazy developer could have taken shortcuts with what they saw as a less important part of the site. Either way, it's bad news and I hope they address it soon.

codingninja 8 years ago | |

I'm a big subscriber to broken windows theory; leaking raw errors and plain text passwords makes me think it's likely common practice...

I've reached out to them so hopefully they can get this sorted!

HNNoLikey 8 years ago | | |

I tried it. It's still not fixed. This is incredibly dangerous.

I think that for all 'non-essential' sites it might be prudent to use a throwaway password each time. I think it might be an all too common practice on many a site.

tedmiston 8 years ago |

More accurate / precise headline: TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Australia site stores user passwords in plaintext

At the bottom it says "Powered by Trackiva" which looks to be a splash page service.

> Trackiva is the platform that powers the famous TechCrunch Battlefield application selection process.

So really it sounds like this splash page service, which looks to be relatively unknown in Google is insecure, making (at least) some of the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities.

Apparently the app is made by this company Fardini Media (https://www.fardinimedia.com/). Hopefully they'll find this thread from a Google Alert or something and fix it.

mtmail 8 years ago |

This website hasn't been updated in a while. http://plaintextoffenders.com/ Scary how many websites still do that.

A website I would've never expected it was https://www.pm.org/, a community website for Perl developers run by ... well Perl developers. https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/1874/perl-mongers/5