Wednesday, May 13, 2009

A Recent WTF

This DailyWTF story reminds me of something similar that happened to me recently. I created a user account in one of the government web sites -- I think it was to pay the water tax -- and there was no option to specify a password during account creation. I thought I would receive an email containing a link for activating the account and specifying a password, but nope, no confirmation email. When I tried to log in using the newly created user name, however, I found a password field guarded by the usual annoying JavaScript alert. I guess you can see where I'm going with this by now: disabling JavaScript bypassed this validation and I was shooed in without any ado.

I haven't tried accessing the site again after this, so I don't know whether this state of affairs persists. Considering that this is a government web site, I wouldn't be surprised if it does.