Earlier this week, a friend (who, for the purposes of this post is named Stephen) relayed a story to me of an email that one of his friends had received recently.
This friend – let’s call him John – runs a local business that requires advance bookings from customers. He runs his entire booking calendar through his website, and as well as customers being able to register an account and book through the website, he can also create bookings on behalf of customers from the administration panel.
It’s this latter scenario that gave rise to the situation I’m about to delve into. John had booked this customer in to his calendar through the admin panel of his WordPress-powered website, and the customer received a confirmation email containing a “Manage Account” link.
The customer clicked this link to view his booking details, and was surprised to find that he could see a lot more bookings than just his own! He, very responsibly, emailed John to let him know, who then in turn got in touch with Stephen (who had built the website) and Stephen then relayed this whole story to me.
Immediately my ears pricked up – that’s not a great situation for a customer to find, as it suggests deep-seated problems with the website’s security, so I volunteered to take a look. The following is what I found…