Saving passwords in public Trello boards is a really, really bad idea

If you put some thing on a publicly-available webpage, you ought to presume that it can (and at some point will) be read through by an additional human being. By that, I imply never set points you’d want to retain key — like passwords and API credentials — in locations wherever anyone may finally locate them.

Appears apparent, right? That is due to the fact it is.

That mentioned, 1 protection researcher stumbled upon a troubling trend of businesses storing delicate credentials in Trello paperwork, no a lot less. An attacker could conveniently discover these with little extra than a Google query.

The researcher, Kushagra Pathak, discovered a veritable treasure-trove of credentials. These include usernames and passwords for email messages and social media accounts, as perfectly as stuff that’s arguably much more severe, like SSH credentials, and API insider secrets for a range of online solutions, like Amazon Website Companies.

Finding these were being as simple as typing into Google factors like:

inurl:https://trello.com AND intext:ssh AND intext:password

Astonishingly, Pathak also encountered some businesses employing public Trello boards to manage their bug bounty packages. This is worrying since they contain a list of ongoing and unresolved stability challenges. An adversary could use this information and facts to quickly enumerate the weaknesses within just a site or program and crack in. They could result in some severe hurt.

Pathak informed TNW he encountered 40 scenarios the place corporations were being accidentally leaking credentials through general public boards. Adhering to right moral disclosure procedures, he educated the relevant events. Many are still to take care of the problem however, and none have paid out him a bug bounty — which is very stingy.

You can examine the total specifics of the challenge on Pathak’s weblog publish for FreeCodeCamp. It is critical to strain that this isn’t truly an challenge with Trello, but relatively with men and women improperly working with the service’s community boards to store delicate qualifications.

As a smart person once claimed, “there’s no patch for human stupidity.”