I find this conversation "interesting".

Serveria, i think some can't see the attack scenario where the
attacker's goal is simply to get email passwords, and nothing else.  it
would make sense for their strategy to do nothing else "bad" on the
server to attract attention to their intrusion.  In that case, all  they
would do is send back the treasure trove of passwords to their home
server(s), and sit there, remaining possibly for years, hiding,
exploiting the fact that dovecot, with no code modification, will allow
them to grab email passwords.  If a dovecot server has thousands of
email accounts, that represents thousands of other devices they could
target, which is worth much more to the attacker than a single dovecot
server.

Oh well, food for thought.


On Tue, 2022-10-11 at 15:11 +0300, Serveria Support wrote:
> Yes, I realize that. But I can't think of a reason this password is
> necessary in the logs. It's kind of a backdoor and has to be removed
> from code. Why make intruder's life easier?
>
> On 2022-10-11 13:39, Arjen de Korte wrote:
> > Citeren Serveria Support <support@serveria.com>:
> >
> >> Yes, there is a tiny problem letting the attacker change this value 
> >> back to yes and instantly get access to users' passwords in plain 
> >> text. Apart from that - no problems at all. :)
> >
> > If an attacker is able to modify your Dovecot configuration, you have
> > bigger problems than leaking your users' password. Much bigger...