IEEE should be embarrassed

“The world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology” has been thoroughly embarrassed in an accident where they left their log files containing user names and passwords open for FTP access to all on the Net for more than a month, according to a DarkReading report. Or, at least, I think they should be embarrassed although they do not seem to be very.

The data for at least 100 000 members were exposed and IEEE took care to close the access. However, having access to the log files is not what I think they should be embarrassed about. As the things go, mistakes in configuration happen and files may become exposed. That’s just life.

However, what is really troublesome is that IEEE, the “world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology” (according to themselves), has logged the usernames together with passwords in plaintext. I mean, we know that’s bad, and that’s been bad for at least a couple of decades. They are definitely at least a couple of decades behind on good security practices. I think that’s really embarrassing.