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I was under the impression that MediaWiki is due to its nature as "open for all Wiki platform" not tailored towards managing sensitive information.
I found some warnings about this on the MediaWiki FAQ and some user account extensions as:
If you need per-page or partial page access restrictions, you are advised to install an appropriate content management package. MediaWiki was not written to provide per-page access restrictions, and almost all hacks or patches promising to add them will likely have flaws somewhere, which could lead to exposure of confidential data. We are not responsible for anything being leaked, leading to loss of funds or one's job.
Now a consultant of my boss tells him there is no problem with sensitive information at all. I would like to hear if he is right and I worry too much.
I suppose all problems would go away if we would use separate instances of MediaWiki for every user group with the same rights.
Think about the risks here:
What sort of data are you planning on populating it with? If it is personal data such as salary, home address or medical data, or if it is credit card data then you may be required to protect it appropriately (in the US see HIPAA, Gramm-Leech-Bliley, SoX and state data protection legislation; in the UK see DPA 1988, FSA regs; in Japan JSoX; Globally PCI-DSS)
Aside from those regulations (and a whole lot of others globally) how would your business cope if the data was deleted, or published on the Internet, or modified, or corrupted?
The answers should help you define an 'appropriate' level of protection, which should then be explained along with the possible risks to the board, who should then make the decision as to whether it should go in.
(tweak the above based on company size, country etc)
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I am working on a scraping project for a company. I used Python selenium, mechanize , BeautifulSoup4 etc. libraries and had been successful on putting data into MySQL database and generating reports they wanted.
But I am curious : why there is no standardization on structure of websites. Every site has a different name\id for username\password fields. I looked at Facebook and Google Login pages, even they have different naming for username\password fields. also, other elements are also named arbitrarily and placed anywhere.
One obvious reason I can see is that bots will eat up lot of bandwidth and websites are basically targeted to human users. Second reason may be because websites want to show advertisements.There may be other reasons too.
Would it not be better if websites don't have to provide API's and there would be a single framework of bot\scraper login. For example, Every website can have a scraper friendly version which is structured and named according to a standard specification which is universally agreed on. And also have a page, which shows help like feature for the scraper. To access this version of website, bot\scraper has to register itself.
This will open up a entirely different kind of internet to programmers. For example, someone can write a scraper that can monitor vulnerability and exploits listing websites, and automatically close the security holes on the users system. (For this those websites have to create a version which have such kind of data which can be directly applied. Like patches and where they should be applied)
And all this could be easily done by a average programmer. And on the dark side , one can write a Malware which can update itself with new attacking strategies.
I know it is possible to use Facebook or Google login using Open Authentication on other websites. But that is only a small thing in scraping.
My question boils down to, Why there is no such effort there out in the community? and If there is one, kindly refer me to it.
I searched over Stack overflow but could not find a similar. And I am not sure that this kind of question is proper for Stack overflow. If not, please refer me to the correct Stack exchange forum.
I will edit the question, if something there is not according to community criteria. But it's a genuine question.
EDIT: I got the answer thanks to #b.j.g . There is such an effort by W3C called Semantic Web.(Anyway I am sure Google will hijack whole internet one day and make it possible,within my lifetime)
EDIT: I think what you are looking for is The Semantic Web
You are assuming people want their data to be scraped. In actuality, the data people scrape is usually proprietary to the publisher, and when it is scraped... they lose exclusivity on the data.
I had trouble scraping yoga schedules in the past, and I concluded that the developers were conciously making it difficult to scrape so third parties couldn't easily use their data.
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Recently, my brother suggested me to use mod_security. I did a research what it truly is and what it does, but I feel very uneasy to decide whether should I use it or not. Here is what in my mind that keep me from not using it.
Slightly affect my website performance. The more rules, the slower it will get.
It does not completely filter all the attacks (it is understandable, because it is not possible for any software to truly protect everything).
Sometimes, it can block innocent users.
Add another software means add another responsibility to maintain it.
Now the real question is:
If mod_security cannot filter everything, and you still need to make
sure your web application is secure, why not properly write a
secure web application without running any Web Application
Firewall?
Since it is our web application, we know better than any 3rd-party software what expected input from users. Having 3rd-party software to detect the attack and then write a input validation in our web application is like a double-check (while it is good, but the performance cost would be double as well).
In the scenario you describe, where you have a custom application written by developers who care about security, I agree that WAFs offer nugatory value as an intrusion prevention system.
The idea that WAFs are effective in automatically providing unknown web apps is industry marketing spin of the worst kind. They provide exceedingly poor performance(*) if not painstakingly configured to fit the application; unless you have a separate security team that has the resources to do that, it is typically indeed better to spend the resources on secure development.
(*: as in protection afforded vs time and custom lost due to false positives; mod_security's core rules are IMO particularly troublesome.)
WAFs are, on the other hand, useful:
as temporary workarounds to allow you to protect legacy and third-party applications with specific known vulnerabilities until such time as they can can be fixed or replaced;
configured as intrusion detection systems, raising alerts rather than blocking, where you have operational resources to follow up and potentially block attack sources.
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I have a forum, user's can post comments, they can also enable/disable and approve comments; however, I can't always trust users will disapprove comments linking to bad domains. Like these: http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/3823-275-bad-domains-to-blacklist
My question is two part:
If a user does hyperlink to a 'bad domain' like those in the link above, will my forum/forum-category/forum-category-thread be penalised by it, and even if so if I add no-follow to the forum thread's links?
Is there a free API service out there, that I can make a request to to get a list of bad domains, so I can then filter them out of users' posts?
I maybe being paranoid, but it's probably because I'm not too SEO savvy.
The actual algorithms aren't public, but this is what I found looking around the 'net.
1) Google's Web master Guidelines says that it may lower ranking for sites that participate in link schemes. As an example of a link scheme, they give "Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web". NoFollow may or may not have impact on it, but the consensus seems to be that it doesn't.
2) You can use either of Google's two safe browsing APIs to check if sites have been found to be phishing and/or malware sites.
If your website linking to bad domains, that will definitely harm your website but again; it is depending upon outgoing links ratio.
I strongly recommend recruit forum moderator from active members who can manually moderate forum post and will help you to save from spamming.
I am not sure but many forums allow various restriction like:
- Only members having number of post can keep link in forum reply
- Only specified months/days old member can share links
- Only particular number of links are allowed in forum post.
Kindly check for such facilities that can help you to restrict the users.
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Often you can use open source projects for free as long as you don't earn money yourself. In that moment you often need to purchase another license in exchange for cash, naming mySQL as an example. But I can't find any information like that about couchDB. So I wonder if it is totally for free, even if you build a business onto it. Can you confirm that?
Check out the Licenses link on the Apache Couch DB site, which links to the main Apache license site.
In general, the Apache licenses are pretty open and allow you to do just about whatever you want with them, provided that you attribute the original work you use to Apache, distribute the license when you distribute any Apache projects, and note any modifications you made.
To determine what the License means for your specific use, please contact a friendly lawyer to advise you on legal issues.
CouchDB, like all Apache projects, is licensed under The Apache License which permits all uses, including commercial ones. You most certainly do not have to pay anything to use CouchDB.
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Your example about MySQL is incorrect. You are free to use the open-source version of MySQL even in a commercial environment. It is true that there is a paid for version if you want extra features or support but like CouchDB there is no restriction on using MySQL in a commercial environment.
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Generally speaking.
How do a project manager evaluate and track the security issue for a project? Or is there any online resource that I can use as a reference ?
I would say that you would track this like everything else you track on your project.
Make sure that there is an architecture and project requirement review -- go though all aspect of the architecture and design and document any issues and questions as you go along. Depending on your application, it may include securing external communication and communication between different parts of the application, and understand any possibilities for malicious user input. If your application store any data, review what data is stored, and ask "what would happen if the data was lost or leaked". Understand how all sensitive data store is encrypted, and make sure that user passwords are never stored (store a oneway hash instead). Review how/if any encryption keys can be rotated, so that loss/leak of key does not mean compromise of security.
Document all issues and questions found in your favorite bug tracking and task management tool, even if just as reminder to get back and inspect actual implementation.
I think you add them as 'risks' or 'tasks' in your ALM system, depending on which phase you are current in with respect to your project.
How to evaluate security issues is usually deferred first to Devs or IT Profs depending on the nature and then reported back to the PM for review.