I’ll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.
-
They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.
-
The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.
-
This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.
-
Here’s my favorite part. You obviously don’t want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you’re thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.
This reminds me of a time at work when we got sued. The company was allegedly using (or had copies) of some tool we couldn’t have anymore. Annoying, but fine. However, to check this, they scanned all of our computers for the name of that company. They told us all to delete our entire local Maven repository. Someone who worked there was on the commiter list for a couple of open source projects. I just manually deleted those files because I knew for a fact that our central Maven repository didn’t have some of the versions of our own code on it and I wasn’t confident we wouldn’t need them again. Turns out I was right and needed to grab one later on to upload. Because I manually deleted the files with the company’s name instead of just deleting everything, the scanner thing they were running didn’t detect offending files. (Not that a file listing someone’s email address as a commiter to an open source project should be offending, but still.)