DISCLAIMER: This article is satire, and should not be taken seriously. Although the methods listed here will indeed get your company hacked in record time, this article was written to highlight security vulnerabilities that programmers should avoid. The methods used in this article are strictly for educational purposes, and should not be used for malicious reasons.

These days, it can be a struggle to get your company hacked. Between all of the new security patches that programmers push out on a day-to-day basis, and all of the fancy tools that you can use to statically analyze your code, getting hacked can be a chore.

Fortunately, I’ve learned some highly-effective methods that will get your company hacked in record time — even if it’s a multi-billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees.

Method #1 – Publicly Leak Your Secrets Into Your Code

I know what you’re thinking. This is too obvious, isn’t it? It’ll get caught in code review, or by code analyzers. Fortunately for you, this method is really effective. How effective, you ask?

It’s so effective, that it caused a massive data privacy breach for over 57 million users for a certain multi-billion dollar company. Don’t worry if you’re not a multi-billion dollar company, because it works even for small companies and small projects, as evidenced by the over 100,000 leaked secrets on GitHub.

Here’s how to do it.

STEP 1 – Add this snippet anywhere in your company’s code. Remember to purposely ignore any password, secret, or key-vault/secret manager that your company might have.

    private String secretKey = "COMPANY_SECRET_KEY_HERE";

STEP 2 – Upload this code to your company’s preferred git repository.

Here, the path diverges based on how your company handles code reviews. If your company does a code review and notices the secret, then they will ask you to change your code. Fortunately, there is still a way to leak your company’s secret keys, even if they ask you to change your code.

The trick is to push the code with the secret, remove it, then push again. If your company approves the PR without squashing, then the leaked secret can be obtained by checking out the commit where you had added the secret, but before you had removed it.

As seen in the image above, by squashing, the commit with the leaked secret disappears and all of it turns into one commit. But if there’s no squashing, and the full history is retained, then you can access the commit history to checkout the commit with the leaked secret.

Method #2 – “Hide” Company Secrets In Slightly Less Plain Sight

This one is almost identical to method #1. The difference is that instead of blatantly being in plain sight, you’ve put a flimsy barrier in-between. For example, you can publish a client library with your secrets inside. Since it’s a client library, users seemingly shouldn’t be able to view the source code to extract your secrets.

Let’s illustrate the scenario. You are a consumer for this client library, and you see the following class structure for one of the client classes:

public class ClassWithSecret {
    private String secret;
    .... (other fields and methods)
}

Sadly, since this is a client library, programmers can’t modify the source code. And since it’s a private field, other programmers won’t be able to read it. Looks fool-proof, doesn’t it? With no way to access the source code, we can have the users use our clients without providing any configuration.

Luckily for us, it’s actually easy to completely side-step this issue, even if the field is private. All you have to remember is that “private” fields are not actually private. They’re a formality for saying, “don’t try to access me, and if you try to do it the normal way, it’ll fail”.

To access private fields, you just have to use reflection, which is a form of meta-programming that will let you modify the runtime behavior of a program.

public class ClassWithSecret {
    private String secret;
}

// Assume we have a ClassWithSecret instance
ClassWithSecret classWithSecret = ....; 

try { 
    Field field = classWithSecret.getClass().getDeclaredField("secret");
    field.setAccessible(true);
    Object secretVal = field.get(classWithSecret);
    System.out.println("The secret was " + secretVal.toString());
} catch (Exception ex) {
    ...
}

By using reflection, we can just manually make the field accessible, and it will be as if it never had a private modifier.

The same thing applies to constants, readonly fields, and more. With reflection, you can override basically any behavior, so you can’t rely solely on language features to protect secrets or to guarantee specific behavior when it comes to client libraries.

In a different vein, another way that programmers often “hide” their secrets is through environmental variables, and one of the worst ways to do it is by putting your secrets into your .bashrc file. Although some may disagree, using environmental variables as a way to hold your secrets is generally bad practice.

However, putting your environmental variables into your .bashrc is absolutely catastrophically bad practice. The worst part is that the majority of online tutorials will actually tell you to do this (there’s a reason why people use key vaults and secret managers!)

So why does this make you susceptible to getting hacked? Because by putting your environmental variables into your .bashrc, you are injecting your environmental variables into every single process that runs on your user. If even a single one of these processes, or one of their child processes dies, they will almost certainly dump or log their environmental variables in some way, and once this happens, your secrets are now visible in your logs/log files. Boom. Your secrets are now in plain-sight.

For a more detailed explanation, check out what Diogo Monica, former security lead of Docker, has to say about this.

Method #3 – Forget About Getting Hacked Online, Get Hacked In-Person

Having your data leaked by online hackers is one thing, but what about getting hacked in-person?

It might sound strange, after all, when was the last time someone got hacked in-person? But getting hacked in-person is actually quite easy. All you have to do is scribble down your company’s passwords onto a piece of paper, or maybe a Post-it note.

Remember that the oldest surviving piece of paper, the Missal of Silos, still exists even after a thousand years, while the oldest known electronic computer, the Eniac Computer, has only existed for a measly 75 years. Therefore, a piece of paper is more durable than a computer, which is why you should be storing your passwords on Post-it notes, rather than something like LastPass.

Now that your password is in the physical realm, where it can safely survive for another thousand years under the right conditions, all you have to do is record a video of yourself with your password in the background. If a video is too difficult, you can alternatively take a photo instead.

Once your password has been leaked to the internet, your company will have successfully been hacked.

Conclusion

Getting hacked can be hard, but as long as you follow this guide, it’s as easy as 1-2-3. Just remember that there are more ways to get hacked than the ones listed above.

If you’re finding that getting hacked is just too easy, you can up the difficulty by using key vaults/secret managers, squashing commits in pull requests, and using static-code analyzers to check for leaked secrets. And most important of all, check your logs for secrets. Secrets should never show up in your logs, because logs are generally publicly visible (ie; in a dashboard or error tracking service).

Now that you know how to get hacked in record time, I challenge you to flip this article on its head, and see how long you can go without getting hacked. Good luck!