Sabotaging Your Own Data Breach with CSVs
Description
This is a two-panel meme featuring the character Skeletor from 'He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,' in a format where he gives terrible advice and then leaves. In the top panel, Skeletor is facing the viewer with his hands open, and the caption reads: 'ADD COMMA'S TO YOUR PASSWORDS TO MESS WITH THE CSV FILE THEY WILL BE DUMPED INTO AFTER BEING BREACHED.' The bottom panel shows Skeletor walking away with the text 'UNTIL NEXT TIME.' The joke is a cynical take on cybersecurity, suggesting that since data breaches are inevitable, one might as well inconvenience the attackers. The humor lies in the technical detail: a comma in a password could break a poorly configured CSV parser, as commas are the default delimiter. For a senior developer, this is funny because it's technically plausible yet utterly useless as a security measure, highlighting the absurdity of trying to get petty revenge in the face of systemic security failures
Comments
27Comment deleted
Using a comma in your password won't stop a breach, but it might cause an intern to spend a week debugging a broken import script, and that's a small victory
Security through RFC 4180 non-compliance: slip a couple commas into your password so when the breach hits, the attacker’s import script and a 3 AM intern both get to discover why pandas suddenly thinks there are 17 columns
The real CSV injection vulnerability was the plaintext passwords we stored along the way. Though honestly, if your breach response plan involves hoping attackers can't handle RFC 4180 compliant parsing, you've got bigger problems than delimiter escaping
The real genius here is weaponizing CSV's Achilles' heel: assuming commas are just delimiters. When your password is 'P@ssw0rd,123,"DROP TABLE users;--', you're not just defending against brute force - you're launching a post-breach DoS attack on the attacker's pandas.read_csv() pipeline. It's the security equivalent of salting the earth after the barbarians have already sacked Rome. Sure, your account is compromised, but at least their ETL job will fail spectacularly at 3 AM, and some junior analyst will spend hours debugging why their credential stuffing automation keeps throwing ParserErrors. Defense in depth? More like spite in depth
If your breach mitigation strategy is weaponizing commas, you don’t need a red team - you need RFC 4180, salted hashes, and a ban on “Export to CSV.”
Because post-breach, why hand attackers clean CSVs when you can force them into a delimiter-fueled ETL debugging marathon?
Password policy: 16+ chars, a symbol, a digit, and one unescaped quote - can’t stop breaches, but we can make their RFC4180 parser rage‑quit on line 1
Big brain time Comment deleted
small brain actually: regular_value,",,,"","" Comment deleted
csv exporter that makes escaping by default: hmm, interesting Comment deleted
Newcomer meme Comment deleted
Or just do what google and youtube does add this to every response's beginning: }]), ); And add ) at the end of the request Comment deleted
And add "; delete table users; Comment deleted
What Comment deleted
Yes I am reversing youtube and google search so i can use it without api key as native apps Comment deleted
But no seriously why do they return that? Comment deleted
Idk but if I remember correctly then youtube has also a response that forces the client to reload the page... you know the page normally doesnt reload completely just updates the non-static content with JavaScript with get requests... so this means the youtube site is already in the browser and doesnt need to be reloaded so when the yt servers get updated and the "old" site in the browser makes a request with the old header the server sends this back to force reload the site: }]), );("reload":"now")) This is totally funny to me Comment deleted
That's normal Comment deleted
for youtube you're probably better off with youtube-dl (well, that's dead, go with the yt-dlp fork) Comment deleted
wait, ydl is dead? Comment deleted
waow, yt-dlp is already available in the main arch repos Comment deleted
I already figured out a lot of stuff at my own. I can rip videos in best quality just like those fake looking video converter sites. Comment deleted
https://xkcd.com/538/ Comment deleted
password he tells: "семидесятипятимиллиметровый" (read as syemIdyesyatIpyatImillimetrOvyiiy (capital letters are stressed), means has length of 75 mm) you have only one attempt for writing password Comment deleted
— Is "seventy-five-millimeters-long" actually long or short? — That depends on the subject: if it is a password, then, probably, yes, otherwise it may be considered tiny. Comment deleted
http://termorect.narod.ru/ Comment deleted
Why the heck someone will use CSV for dumping if it can be SQLite or MySQL? https://datasette.io/ take a look at this. Comment deleted