I hacked a dating app (and how not to treat a security researcher)

Not excusing this is any way, but this app is apparently a fairly junior effort by university students. While it should make every effort to follow good security (and communication) practices, I'd not be too hard on them considering how some big VC funded "adult" companies behave when presented with similar challenges.

https://georgetownvoice.com/2025/04/06/georgetown-students-c...

I vehemently disagree. 'Well, they didn't know what they were doing, so we shouldn't judge them too harshly' is a silly thing to say. They didn't know what they were doing _and still went through with it_. That's an aggravating, not extenuating, factor in my book. Kind of like if a driver kills someone in an accident and then turns out not to have a license.

This is exactly why I think software engineering should require a licensing requirement, much like civil engineering. I get that people will complain about that destroying all sorts of things, and it might, yes, but fight me. Crap like this is exactly why it should be a requirement, and why you won’t convince me that the idea is not in general a good one.

While the idea is good, I'm not sure how this would get implemented realistically. The industry standards/audits are silly checkbox exercises rather then useful security. The biggest companies are often terrible as far as secure design goes. The government security rules lag years behind the SotA. For example how long did it take NIST to stop recommending changing passwords?

Civil engineering works well because we mostly figured it out anyway. But looking at PCI, SOX and others, we'd probably just require people to produce a book's worth of documentation and audit trail that comes with their broken software.

I worked on a project that was using federal tax information and had IRS 1075 compliance requirements. Those follow some version of NIST that was out of date at the time.

We had two security teams. Security and compliance. It was not possible to be secure and compliant, so the compliance team had to document every deviance from the IRS standard and document why, then self-report us and the customer to audit the areas where we were outside the lines. That took a dozen people almost a year to do.

All of that existed because a US state (S Carolina iirc) was egregiously incompetent and ended up getting breached. Congress “did something” about it.