A Lesson on the Fundamentals

[straight_stewie]

So this is a website called jail tracker (still broken as of 12/19/16). It lets you view your friends jail status, any open cases, and their bail/bond. It contains only already public information, so breeches of security aren't necessarily a big deal from the standpoint of privacy. However, the website has failed and leaves us with this, lovely page:


Some of the text is cut off.

Just about the only thing worse for security than a stack trace is actually showing people your full source code.

And that brings me to the point: Always practice the fundamentals of error checking and exception handling. If this were a website like Facebook, Yahoo, or Twitter, billions of peoples personal information would be at EXTREME risk.

[madknight3]

3 minutes ago, straight_stewie said:

Always practice the fundamentals of error checking and exception handling

Also utilize things like error pages so even if you miss something, the user doesn't see anything they shouldn't. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

I bought this book a few months ago. While it's geared towards Node.js web applications, the content can be applied pretty much anywhere: https://www.amazon.com/Secure-Your-Node-js-Web-Application/dp/1680500856