Instead of fessing up to how bad they are as a company, they now want to get a security researcher in jail. I originally had another topic planned, but then I got assigned this story and I think it might actually be interesting for privacy-conscious international audiences, too. So this time, on The Private Citizen , we will be talking about the company here in Germany that is trying to get a security researcher in jail, instead of admitting that they did something very bad with the user data of , people.
This podcast was recorded with a live audience on my Twitch channel. Details on the time of future recordings can usually be found on my personal website.
Recordings of these streams get saved to a YouTube playlist for easy watching on demand after the fact. Earlier this week, I had the questionable distinction of having to research a story that a colleague had broken a few days earlier. I talked to some sources and wrote this piece and followed it up with an op-ed. An independent programmer who was working for a retailer was tasked with debugging software by a German company from Gelsenkirchen called Modern Solution.
This company provides a solution that ties independent resellers into the marketplaces of big German online stores like Otto, Kaufland and Check These companies run online shopping platforms, but much like international companies like Amazon do, they also allow independent retailers to offer their ware on the platform to diversify their inventory and take a cut of the sale. The big platforms have APIs that independent retailers must talk to if they want to list their wares and get the shipping information for the resultant sales.
Companies like Modern Solution are essentially middle men. They offer to connect the inventory management systems of retails to all of these stores in one fell swoop, no additional programming necessary. More customers, more sales, less hassle. Well, the problem is, as our programmer discovered, that the system Modern Solution set up, was crap. It sent SQL commands directly over the wire to a remote server. Unencrypted SQL commands. To a remote server. But it gets worse.
