Cloudflare revealed a serious bug in its software today that caused sensitive data like passwords, cookies, authentication tokens to spill in plaintext from its customers’ websites. The announcement is a major blow for the content delivery network, which offers enhanced security and performance for more than 5 million websites.
This could have allowed anyone who noticed the error to collect a variety of very personal information that is typically encrypted or obscured.
Remediation was complicated by an additional wrinkle. Some of that data was automatically cached by search engines, making it particularly difficult to clean up the aftermath as Cloudflare had to approach Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines and ask them to manually scrub the data.
