PayPal 2FA Bypass
Mistakes were made, and there are definitely lessons to be learned, but if we want to improve the state of security, we really need to change the way we react to these types of bugs.If a service has an outage and a company posts a postmortem, we all think: "wow! that was an interesting bug, lets learn from this".
We shouldn't be treating security issues differently.People who make security mistakes aren't idiots. They aren't negligent. They're engineers just like us, who have tight deadlines, blindspots and mistakes.
Shaming people and companies for security bugs will only cause less transparency and less sharing of information - making us all less secure.This is a really cool bug. Kudos to the researcher for finding it, responsibly reporting it, and to paypal for fixing it in a timely fashion.
Hopefully - this type of bug changes some internal processes and the way the company thinks about 2FA.As for security questions - these are obviously insecure, and should really never be relied on. If you can opt out of security questions - do so. If you can't - just generate a random password as the answer. "I_ty/:QWuCllV?'6ILs`O12kl;d0-`1" is an excellent name for your first dog / high school. Just don't forget to use a password manager to store these.