I’m getting a bit sick of large corporations a) demanding excess data as a condition of doing business with me, b) allowing it to be stolen, and c) giving zero fucks about it.
What are some things that us netizens can do to make our displeasure known.
Extra points for funny ideas.
Explanation for illiterates?
It’s an SQL injection joke.
Basically, when dealing with databases, you can use SQL to search or modify the data in that database. By default, you can do this by polling the database with an SQL query. But this introduces a vulnerability called SQL injection. Basically, imagine if instead of filling in a name in the “Name” field, you filled in an SQL query. If the database admins haven’t protected themselves against it, then the database will happily run that query; You have just injected an SQL query into their database. Maybe you’re a malicious attacker, looking to get a virus onto the system, or looking to extract the data.
Protecting the database from injection is done with something called sanitizing. Basically, you set up filters to disallow SQL, so it can’t touch your database. In this comic, the database admins didn’t do that, so they were unprotected.
The actual SQL uses the student’s middle name to search for any tables named “Students” and permanently delete it. The joke is that when the school admin staff enters his name into their database, it will delete any tables named “Students” and wreck their database.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/327:_Exploits_of_a_Mom
SQL sanitization joke. Won’t affect most databases today.
As a security consultant who tests web applications on the regular: LOL
Still, any programmer worth their salt should filter their inputs. One group at work refuses to do it and they always get away with it and it’s infuriating
One group at work refuses to do it
Sounds like a huge liability to the company.
and they always get away with it
Until they don’t. All it would take is one malicious actor (competing company, spurned employee, data thief, etc) wrecking/stealing their entire database with an injection attack.
Their exact position would make it significantly less likely, since they aren’t working with databases, but software for individual products. That being said, it’s still shitty practice
Do not use actual names, birthdays, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, etc. There’s no reason they need to know that info and I love/hate seeing physical mail and email show up with my made up info. Doesn’t work when paying for stuff though.
As others have said, the best instances of direct action are illegal.
I think the most effective method is to do some sort of organized boycott. We all know well enough how sheisty these companies are. Time to start encouraging each other to quit them en masse.
To bad that most participants give in and return shortly after leaving.
me explaining how evil Nestle is every time a family member buys a product, them agreeing that’s the most evil thing they’ve ever heard, and then doing it all over again next week …
Welcome to political organizing.
Use bots to apply for the open positions to waste time. Reject them all for not enough pay.
Post public info of the CEO class
Piracy
Give fake data when using all services.
Start and join boycott groups.
Use their social media against them. Eg post their dirty laundry as a comment on their post.
Use EICAR test strings as your password.
If they store your password in plain text the AV will lock the user database.
If your password gets leaked and they are using bad password security, when your password is cracked the AV will isolate the file.
ELI5 please? I’ve read the other replies, but would love to understand a bit more.
EICAR test strings are strings of text that can be used to test an antivirus. Basically, you bury the file somewhere, and see if your AV picks it up. The joke being that if they’re storing your password in plaintext (a big no-no from a security standpoint) then their AV will clamp down on the database once you create your account and the test string is embedded.
It wouldn’t work in this instance, unfortunately; EICAR test strings are only meant to work when embedded in files that are shorter than 128 bytes. And every database is almost certainly larger than that.
Whoa, I wanna try this now! Thx!
Ah… “advice” consisting of “I’ve heard of a thing”
Bold of you to assume a corporation storing passwords in plain text would be using AV
According to EICAR’s specification the antivirus detects the test file only if it starts with the 68-byte test string and is not more than 128 bytes long. As a result, antiviruses are not expected to raise an alarm on some other document containing the test string.
This won’t work, assuming the database file is more than 128 bytes long
deleted by creator
I think the important distinction would be ‘file’ or ‘record’. Passwords aren’t really a file in a database iirc and records in a database have a storage limit
This is diabolical. I approve.
Being a non-programmer I had to look up what that is
If a company is publicly traded, then all leaked individuals are given 50.1% controlling stock in the company, split among the victims with new stocks created for them, with unclaimed stocks held in a trust controlled by anyone that did respond to claim stocks. They can sell the stocks, or drive the company into the ground out of spite. Maybe even both.
Companies not publicly traded have 3 months to make all code used, trademarked material, and patents open source in perpetuity, and 1 year to convert their corporate structure into a non-profit.
Regardless of the size of the company, the CEO, CTO, and board must eat their weight in fried bugs. They get to pick the type of bug from a list of 5 options, and any seasoning they want. Live streams of the bug eating will be monetized and the proceeds given to orphans, under the title of “It’s not a bug, its a feature.”
What we’re talking about can easily be devalued, among other things.
Send a copy of the receipt for your donation to the open source project that most closely aims to be their alternative. Explain why you’re angry in 3 sentences and do so like you are condescendingly speaking to a five year old.
Make the letter public, so other people know & get informed.
Make the letter public, so other people know & get informed.
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Ad-Nauseum is a nice way to inject a ton of garbage into the data corps collect.
I played around with this some time ago, until I thought more about it: using tools like this makes adtech money.
Adtech doesn’t care if you’re interested in X or Y, just that they can charge the advertiser for it. By injecting fake traffic, they’re getting more data to sell.
Don’t use their services.
I’m skeptical that anything legal will work for very long because they will quickly work to make said legal action illegal.
But we can have some fun along the way, and it does change behaviour for a bit.
Report bugs that don’t actually exist. Keep reporting the same bug from different emails. Works especially well for apps.
Oh fuck you, buddy. Lol I find it infuriating the amout of product and software bugs that get ignored and passed to every sequential generation that follows and you wanna pile on fake bugs. You’re not my buddy, pal.
Use AI to generate false info to feed into their database
I love putting wrong AI slop in every optional field or space I can get away with for profiles and accounts that don’t really matter.
If an extension exists for this I’ll use it
Start Self hosting. Keeping my data at home is how I’m sticking it to the man these days.
