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Posted by kevincox 1 hour ago

Web security is too hard(textslashplain.com)
124 points | 51 comments
yellow_lead 1 hour ago|
At one point in the article, the author asks Cloudflare's bot if they're launching a Wallet product, and it says no.

> There is no such product in our documentation or dashboard, so treat any email, website, or message claiming to be "Cloudflare Wallet" as a phishing attempt.

What's the point of adding these AI chatbots if they're hopelessly uninformed about your products?

bakugo 1 hour ago||
The point is to signal to investors that they're all-in on the current fad, thus making the stock price go up.
mirashii 1 hour ago||
What’s the point? To save money paying a human to man a support email. That human would have also been hopelessly uninformed for all the same reasons.
sholladay 1 hour ago|||
> That human would have also been hopelessly uninformed for all the same reasons.

Not really. At minimum, a half-way decent support person would ask a few people internally or search Slack before answering.

In fact, they would have likely already heard about the new product at lunch or something.

munk-a 53 minutes ago|||
Most chat support people were contractors hired from third party companies that were given dossiers about their products that were often quite out of date because poor management has always been a thing.
vntok 41 minutes ago|||
> At minimum, a half-way decent support person would ask a few people internally or search Slack before answering.

Of course not. The extremely vast majority of support staff aren't connected to "internal people" and certainly don't have any access to the main company's Slack.

Most of all, those people are paid very little on very tight length-per-interaction targets. They can't spend any time at all looking for stuff outside the docs package or chatting with peeps outside the immediate costaff.

sandeepkd 11 minutes ago||
Its an organic cycle, as the company grows big the number of relevant areas grow too and inter team communication becomes way too costly/impractical. The big company becomes a group of informal small companies, each running in their own direction and at times competing with each other. Areas like customer support are not really good candidate for career growth so they get least resources and manpower.
Groxx 1 hour ago||||
If you have no training or knowledge-base to search, sure. But then you'd be an awful support-team employer.
saghm 12 minutes ago||
I mean, yes? That sounds pretty accurate for most companies before chatbots became the new hot thing
wslh 1 hour ago||||
And as a dark pattern it adds "positive friction" for the company reducing the number of people that will have the motivation of obtaining the real people support.
saghm 14 minutes ago||
Several weeks ago I had an issue not being able to login to Verizon's website, so I tried to chat with someone. The chatbot that was gatekeeping was predictably useless said it would redirect me to a human except...it kept prompting me to log in first. It was literally impossible to differentiate from if they literally had no humans online to talk to at all.
mihaaly 1 hour ago||||
I could be the best money saver for them - and ask for a hefty premium for my services - by terminating all support. No costs, nada, full save! Genius, right?! Never gives false info, never!

Ok, ok, need to have a tickmark next to the 'support' item in the quarterlies, let it be an eternal spinning wheel presenting on clicking the 'Our award winning instant support is HERE!' button then. Its close to the real experience anyway, right?

ozim 24 minutes ago||
Web Developers, please follow every best practice, I’m begging you

Marketing people just make bunch of marketing domains. Business people push all kind of BS ideas.

No one is asking Web Developers about their opinion man.

STOP making everything developers fault.

63stack 1 hour ago||
My main takeaway from this is not that "security is hard" but that cloudflare is pretty incompetent.
madeofpalk 1 hour ago|
The takeaway is that everyone makes security hard. Everyone does this anti-pattern of having these other domains that defeat all their own security recommendations.

GitHub for ages had something like githubnext.com where they would make you do this same OAuth dance (except IIRC it was worse - it explicitly said that it WASNT GitHub). Apple has/had an apple.tv microsite or something they hosted content on.

Your bank will send you “legitimate” surveys or communication from some third party domain like qualtropics.com.

joemi 11 minutes ago||
It looks like they've updated the cloudflare.pay site to link to the blog post on cloudflare.com that introduces wallets. So they fixed it on the same day they launched. That's not too bad, in my book.
1970-01-01 1 hour ago||
This isn't a secfail. Why is pay.cloudflare.com so hard to establish? Why does marketing always get to overpower engineering? I expect Cloudflare services to avoid some sketchy .pay TLD for exactly the reasons this person went through.
andremendes 1 hour ago||
What a ride of a read. I was 100% it was phishing and I got really surprised to find out it wasn't.
EGreg 4 minutes ago|
I only realized it wasnt after googling for the phrase “cloudflare.pay” and finding the announcement on Cloudflare’s own blog, which I trust because it is on cloudflare.com

All the bots including Google’s say it’s a phishing scam site probably, since they don’t know Cloudflare has a wallet product.

epochbtc 1 hour ago||
Ironically, this might be at least partially because the internal security controls at Cloudflare for using or provisioning new domains/subdomains is so difficult and arduous that the team decided the fastest way to go to market is to get an entirely new domain. Possible bonus that the official bug bounty program won't apply either, since it's on a new domain so any vulnerabilities found won't have to be paid out (as much).
AndrewKemendo 1 minute ago||
I’d argue this is exactly why this happened and why the poster is correct but missing the point:

Your organizational management is the problem not the technology

If you can’t coordinate internally to roll out a proper domain then I question how well your teams are managed

OkayPhysicist 51 minutes ago||
Why is this so, so common? They're subdomains. They're free. It's not hitting anybody's budget to publish a new DNS entry. If someone has permission to publish anything in your name, they probably should be able to go make themselves a subdomain.
edent 27 minutes ago|||
Because they point foo.example.com to AWS. They then let whatever the CNAME is pointing to lapse. Then an attacker registers the lapsed AWS and can now put their content on your trusted domain.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/threat-tactic-spotligh...

(AWS have since fixed this problem, but it exists on other services.)

saghm 2 minutes ago||
So the solution is to make it even easier to let the domain records lapse by putting it outside the place where everyone would know about it, with the added bonus that now you can super easily let the domain registration itself lapse without noticing so that your customers who have been told to use it can get directly pwned by whoever grabs it?
epochbtc 38 minutes ago|||
Counter-argument is: do you really want some team of 90% marketers and PMs throwing up a MVP/WIP codebase for some ancillary product not related to your core business on your core domain? At a minimum you'd want a thorough security review and risk assessment, and that goes against the ethos of "ship fast and pivot as needed".
ryandrake 15 minutes ago|||
Why does the TLD matter in this case? How does your security/risk posture change if you launch on myexperiment.mycompany.com vs. www.mycompanyexperiment.website that you had to go out and newly purchase? Asking because I legit don't know.
saghm 9 minutes ago|||
I mean, it sounds like they're already doing that, just with extra downside
dwedge 1 hour ago||
I guess it's easy to judge from the sidelines but was the screenshot of the site, if not the first tweet, not an obvious scam? And you can say it's from context but I only read the title before my eyes jumped to the screenshot
dwedge 1 hour ago|
I just read the rest of the article and I'm back with my tail between my legs. I guess I made the author's point.
Hovertruck 1 hour ago||
Don't worry, I think everyone probably went on the same roller coaster with this one
thadt 1 hour ago||
In the movie Sneakers, a whole scene is taken up sending some guy on a date with Mary McDonnell so she could record clips of his voice. Today she'd just need a phone call or his Instagram. It's getting harder to keep up with who _people_ are online, much less organizations and domain names.

Identity is hard y'all.

Joker_vD 1 hour ago|
Another entry in "Marketing department starts a promotion campaign for the new product that's indistinguishable from a phishing attack" list. Starting with not using a subdomain on your own, very well-known domain but instead using a completely different one, then not having it shown with the rest of your services on your main web site, et cetera.
raesene9 1 hour ago||
Same Story as it ever was. The first time I encountered what I thought was a phishing attack at the bank I worked at 25 years ago, it turned out to be a marketing campaign, with URLs that put our company name as a user before the domain name (back in the day when creds could go in the URL).
ericlaw 1 hour ago||
Fun fact: still can in Chromium-based browsers. https://textslashplain.com/2023/03/22/attack-techniques-spoo...
spc476 53 minutes ago|||
It's probably easier for the marketing department to get a new domain up and running that it is for a new subdomain within their own company. Battling Business Units and all that.
derektank 1 hour ago|||
You really would think that at least in theory a company like Cloudflare would make it very easy for internal teams to automatically request new subdomains
nerdsniper 1 hour ago||
Running marketing off a separate domain is often a conscious decision because if they start getting blocked for spam, then critical service/operational emails from your actual domain might also get blocked.
make3 1 hour ago||
this is the correct take
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