• rtxn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Our business-critical internal software suite was written in Pascal as a temporary solution and has been unmaintained for almost 20 years. It transmits cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests. They also use a single decade-old Excel file to store vital statistics. A key part of the workflow involves an Excel file with a macro that processes an HTML document from the clipboard.

    I offered them a better solution, which was rejected because the downtime and the minimal training would be more costly than working around the current issues.

    • Tar_alcaran@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The library I worked for as a teen used to process off-site reservations by writing them to a text file, which was automatically e-faxed to all locations every odd day.

      If you worked at not-the-main-location, you couldn’t do an off-site reservation, so on even days, you would print your list and fax it to the main site, who would re-enter it into the system.

      This was 2005. And yes, it broke every month with an odd number of days.

    • bleistift2@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests

      I’m not an infrastructure person. If the receiving web server doesn’t log the URI, and supposing the communication is encrypted with TLS, which removes the credentials from the URI, are there security concerns?

      • nudelbiotop@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Anyone who has access to any involved network infrastructure can trace the cleartext communication and extract the credentials.