Writing about it is essentially confessing. You need a lawyer, and a good one. And you need to read about these things.
I guess I should feel lucky they didn't try to have me criminally prosecuted.
Huh, apparently they're registered in Malta, what a coincidence...
[0]: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/maltese-scuba-diving-insura...
https://www.reddit.com/r/scuba/comments/1r9fn7u/apparently_a...
They left more than enough clues to figure out that this is DAN (Divers Alert Network) Europe.
Ironically, this will garner far more attention and focus on them than if they had disclosed this quietly without threats.
There are only a few globally relevant diving insurers. DAN America is US based. DiveAssure is not Maltese. AquaMed is German. The one large diving insurer that is actually headquartered and registered in Malta is DAN Europe. Given that the organization is described as being registered in Malta and subject to Maltese supervisory processes, DAN Europe becomes the most plausible candidate based on structure and jurisdiction alone.
Why sign anything at all? The company was obviously not interested in cooperation, but in domination.
Or better, don't[1]:
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
If it was a random JS error, well, that reminds me of: https://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html
Governments and companies talk a big game about how important cybersecurity is. I'd like to see some legislation to prevent companies and governments [1] behaving with unwarranted hostility to security researchers who are helping them.
https://www.nilsbecker.de/rechtliche-grauzonen-fuer-ethische...
We need a change in law but more to do with fining security breaches or requiring certification to run a site above X number of users.
I've dealt with security issues a number of times over my career, and I'm genuinely unsure what my legal obligations would be in response to an email like this. He says the company has committed "multiple GDPR violations"; is there something I need to say in response to preserve any defenses the company may have or minimize the fines? What must I do to ensure that he does eventually delete the customer data? If I work with him before the data is deleted, or engage in joint debugging that gives him the opportunity to exfiltrate additional data, is there a risk that I could be liable for failing to protect the data from him?
There's really no option when getting an email like this other than immediately escalating to your lawyers and having them handle all further communication.
Knowing the front door is unlocked does not mean you can go inside.
No expert but I assume anything you do that is good faith usage of the site is OK. And take screenshots and report the potential problem. But making a python script to pull down data once you know? That is like getting in that car.
Real life example of fine would be you walk past a bank at midnight when it is unstaffed and the doors open so you have access to lobby (and it isnt just the night atm area). You call police on non emergency no and let them know.
It's readily evident that people have an account with a default password on the site for some amount of time, and some of them indefinitely. You know what data is in the account (as the person who creates the accounts) and you know the IDs are incremental. You can do the login request and never use the retrieved access/session token (or use a HEAD request to avoid getting body data but still see the 200 OK for the login) if you want to beat the dead horse of "there exist users who don't configure a strong password when not required to". OP evidenced that they went beyond that and saw at least the date of birth of a user on there by saying "I found underage students on your site" in the email to the organization
If laws don't make it illegal to do this kind of thing, how would you differentiate between the white hat and the black hat? The former can choose to do the minimum set of actions necessary to verify and report the weakness, while the latter writes code to dump the whole database. That's a choice
To be fair, not everyone is aware that this line exists. It's common to prove the vulnerability, and this code does that as well. It's also sometimes extra work (set a custom request method, say) to limit what the script retrieves and just not the default kind of code you're used to writing for your study/job. Going too far happens easily in that sense. So the rules are to be taken leniently and the circumstances and subsequent actions of the hacker matter. But I can see why the German the rules are this way, and the Dutch ones are similar for example
If you’re reporting to a nontechnical team…which sometimes you are…sometimes you do?
In jurisdictions like the one I'm most familiar with, it's official national policy not to prosecute when you did the minimum necessary. In a case where you're otherwise stuck, it's entirely reasonable to retrieve 1 record for the sake of a screenshot and preventing a bigger data leak. You could also consider doctoring a screenshot based on your own data. By the time they figured out the screenshot was fake, it landed on a technical person's desk who saw that the vulnerability is real
Lots of steps to go until it's necessary to dump the database as OP did, but I'll agree it can sometimes (never happened to me) be necessary to access at least one other person's data, and more frequently that it will happen by accident
They're perfectly capable of hiring incident response experts, and companies commonly have cyber insurance that'll pay for it.
"Demonstrating" is dumb and means you turn an ordinary disclosure into personal liability for you.
Blabbing about it on the internet is just the idiot cherry on the stupid cake.
I had bought a ticket, which arrived as a link by email. The URL was something like example.com/tickets/[string]
The string was just the order number in base 64. The order number was, of course, sequential.
I emailed the organizer and the company that built the order system. They immediately fixed it... Just kidding. It's still wide open and I didn't hear anything from them.
I'm waiting for this year's edition. Maybe they'll have fixed it.
At this point 'responsible disclosure' just means 'giving a company a head start on hiring a lawyer before you go public.'
> every account was provisioned with a static default password
Hehehe. I failed countless job interviews for mistakes much less serious than that. Yet someone gets the job while making worse mistakes, and there are plenty of such systems on production handling real people's data.
My own suggestion to anyone reading this... version your password hashing mechanics so you can upgrade hashing methods as needed in the future. I usually use "v{version}.{salt}.{hash}" where salt and the resulting hash are a base64 string of the salt and result. I could use multiple db fields for the same, but would rather not... I could also use JSON or some other wrapper, but feel the dot-separated base64 is good enough.
I have had instances where hashing was indeed upgraded later, and a password was (re)hashed at login with the new encoding if the version changed... after a given time-frame, will notify users and wipe old passwords to require recovery process.
FWIW, I really wish there were better guides for moderately good implementations of login/auth systems out there. Too many applications for things like SSO, etc just become a morass of complexity that isn't always necesssary. I did write a nice system for a former employer that is somewhat widely deployed... I tried to get permission to open-source it, but couldn't get buy in over "security concerns" (the irony). Maybe someday I'll make another one.
For example, with unsuitable algorithms like sha256, you get this, which doesn't have a version field:
import hashlib; print(f"MD5: {hashlib.md5(b'password').hexdigest()}")
print(f"SHA-256: {hashlib.sha256(b'password').hexdigest()}")
MD5: 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99
SHA-256: 5e884898da28047151d0e56f8dc6292773603d0d6aabbdd62a11ef721d1542d8
import argon2; print(f"Argon2: {argon2.PasswordHasher().hash('password')}")
import bcrypt; print(f"bcrypt: {bcrypt.hashpw(b'password', bcrypt.gensalt()).decode()}")
from passlib.hash import scrypt; print(f"scrypt: {scrypt.hash('password')}")
Argon2: $argon2id$v=19$m=65536,t=3,p=4$LZ/H9PWV2UV3YTgF3Ixrig$aXEtfkmdCMXX46a0ZiE0XjKABfJSgCHA4HmtlJzautU
bcrypt: $2b$12$xqsibRw1wikgk9qhce0CGO9G7k7j2nfpxCmmasmUoGX4Rt0B5umuG
scrypt: $scrypt$ln=16,r=8,p=1$/V8rpRTCmDOGcA5hjPFeCw$6N1e9QmxuwqbPJb4NjpGib5FxxILGoXmUX90lCXKXD4
$ htpasswd -bnBC 10 "" password
:$2y$10$Bh67PQAd4rqAkbFraTKZ/egfHdN392tyQ3I1U6VnjZhLoQLD3YzRe* account ids are numeric, and incrementing
* included in the URL after login, e.g. ?account=123456
* no authentication on requests after login
So anybody moderately curious can just increment to account_id=123457 to access another account. And then try 123458. And then enumerate the space to see if there is anything interesting... :face-palm: :cold-sweat:
A friend at the company started poking around in the CMS. Turns out the login system worked by giving the user a cookie with the mongodb document id for the user they’re logged in as. Not signed or anything. Just the document id in plain text. Document IDs are (or at least were) mostly sequential, so you could just enumerate document IDs in your cookie to log in as anyone.
The ceo told us it wasn’t actually a security vulnerability. Then insisted we didn’t need to assign a CVE or tell any of our customers and users. He didn’t want to fix the code. Then when pushed he wanted to slip a fix into the next version under the cover of night and not tell anyone. Preferably hidden in a big commit with lots of other stuff.
It’s become a joke between us too. He gives self taught programmers a bad rep. These days whenever I hear a product was architected by someone who’s self taught, I always check how the login system works. It’s often enlightening.
The only sensible approach here would have been to cease all correspondence after their very first email/threat. The nation of Malta would survive just fine without you looking out for them and their online security.
Cold approach vulnerability reports to non-technical organizations quite frankly scare them. It might be like someone you've never met telling you the door on your back bedroom balcony can be opened with a dummy key, and they know because they tried it.
Such organizations don't kmow what to do. They're scared, thinking maybe someone also took financial information, etc. Internal strife and lots of discussions usually occur with lots of wild specualation (as the norm) before any communication back occurs.
It just isn't the same as what security forward organizations do, so it often becomes as a surprise to engineers when "good deed" seems to be taken as malice.
Maybe they should simply use some common sense? If someone could and would steal valuables, it seems highly unlikely that he/she/it would notify you before doing it.
If they would want to extort you, they would possibly do so early on. And maybe encrypt some data as a "proof of concept" ...
But some organizations seem to think that their lawyers will remedy every failure and that's enough.
after* doing it. Though I agree with your general point
Note the parts in the email to the organization where OP (1) mentions they found underage students among the unsecured accounts and (2) attaches a script that dumps the database, ready to go¹. It takes very little to see in access logs that they accessed records that they weren't authorized to, which makes it hard to distinguish their actions from malicious ones
I do agree that if the org had done a cursory web search, they'd have found that everything OP did (besides dumping more than one record from the database) is standard practice and that responsible disclosure is an established practice that criminals obviously wouldn't use. That OP subsequently agrees to sign a removal agreement, besides the lack of any extortion, is a further sign of good faith which the org should have taken them up on
¹ though very inefficiently, but the data protection officer that they were in touch with (note: not a lawyer) wouldn't know that and the IT person that advises them might not feel the need to mention it
I'm surprised to see this take only mentioned once in this thread. I think people here are not aware of the sheer amount of fraud in the "bug bounty" space. As soon as you have a public product you get at least 1 of these attempts per week of someone trying to shake you down for a disclosure that they'll disclose after you pay them something. Typically you just report them as spam and move on.
But if I got one that had some credible evidence of them reporting me to a government agency already, I'd immediately get a lawyer to send a cease and desist.
It seems like OP was trying to be a by the book law abiding citizen, but the sheer amount of fraud in this space makes it really hard to tell the difference from a cold email.
Was a bit of a "oh god what am I getting into again" moment (also considering I don't speak legal-level German), but I knew they had nothing to stand on if they did file a complaint or court case so I followed through and they just thanked me for the report in the end and fixed it reasonably promptly. No stickers or maybe a discount as a customer, but oh well, no lawsuit either :)
Here all databases with personal information must be registered there and data must be secure.
I came across a pretty serious security concern at my company this week. The ramifications are alarming. My education, training and experience tells me one thing: identify, notify, fix. Then when I bring it to leadership, their agenda is to take these conversations offline, with no paper trail, and kill the conversation.
Anytime I see an article about a data breach, I wonder how long these vulnerabilities were known and ignored. Is that just how business is conducted? It appears so, for many companies. Then why such a focus on security in education, if it has very little real-world application?
By even flagging the issue and the potential fallout, I’ve put my career at risk. These are the sort of things that are supposed to lead to commendations and promotions. Maybe I live in fantasyland.
I was in a very similar position some years ago. After a couple of rounds of “finish X for sale Y then we'll prioritise those issue”, which I was young and scared enough to let happen, and pulling on heartstrings (“if we don't get this sale some people will have to go, we risk that to [redacted] and her new kids, can we?”) I just started fixing the problems and ignoring other tasks. I only got away with the insubordination because there were things I was the bus-count-of-one on at the time and when they tried to butter me up with the promise of some training courses, I had taken & passed some of those exams and had the rest booked in (the look of “good <deity>, he got an escape plan and is close to acting on it” on the manager's face during that conversation was wonderful!).
The really worrying thing about that period is that a client had a pen-test done on their instance of the app, and it passed. I don't know how, but I know I'd never trust that penetration testing company (they have long since gone out of business, I can't think why).
At least compared to our internal digital security group would couldn't fathom, "your test is wrong for how this app is configured, that path leads to a different app and default behavior" it's not actually a failure... to a canned test for a php exploit. The app wasn't php, it was an SPA and always delivered the same default page unless in the /auth/* route.
After that my response became, show me an actual exploit with an actual data leak you can show me and I'll update my code instead of your test.
Simple as. Not your company? not your problem? Notify, move on.
For an external company “not your company, not your problem” for security issues is not a good moral position IMO. “I can't risk the fallout in my direction that I'm pretty sure will result from this” is more understandable because of how often you see whistle-blowers getting black-listed, but I'd still have a major battle with the pernickety prick that is my conscience¹ and it would likely win out in the end.
[1] oh, the things I could do if it wasn't for conscience and empathy :)
The article doesn't say exactly, but if they used their company e-mail account to send the e-mail it's difficult to argue it wasn't related to their business.
They also put "I am offering" language in their e-mail which I'm sure triggered the lawyers into interpreting this a different way. Not a choice of words I would recommend using in a case like this.
I had a bit of a feral journey into tech, poor upbringing => self taught college dropout waiting tables => founded iPad point of sale startup in 2011 => sold it => Google in 2016 to 2023
It was absolutely astounding to go to Google, and find out that all this work to ascend to an Ivy League-esque employment environment...I had been chasing a ghost. Because Google, at the end of the day, was an agglomeration of people, suffered from the same incentives and disincentives as any group, and thus also had the same boring, basic, social problems as any group.
Put more concretely, couple vignettes:
- Someone with ~5 years experience saying approximately: "You'd think we'd do a postmortem for this situation, but, you know how that goes. The people involved think they're an organization-wide announcement that you're coming for them, and someone higher ranked will get involved and make sure A) it doesn't happen or B) you end up looking stupid for writing it."
- A horrible design flaw that made ~50% of users take 20 seconds to get a query answered was buried, because a manager involved was the one who wrote the code.
Whatever the selection process is for gestures broadly at everything, it's not selecting for being both (hell, often not for either) able and willing to do a good job, so far as what the job is apparently supposed to be. This appears to hold for just about everything, reputation and power be damned. Exceptions of high-functioning small groups or individuals in positions of power or prestige exist, as they do at "lower" levels, but aren't the norm anywhere as far as I've been able to discern.
Maybe not when it is as much as 20 seconds, but an old manager of mine would save fixing something like that for a “quick win” at some later time! He would even have artificial delays put in, enough to be noticeable and perhaps reported but not enough to be massively inconvenient, so we could take them out during the UAT process - it didn't change what the client finally got, but it seemed to work especially if they thought they'd forced us to spend time on performance issues (those talking to us at the client side could report this back up their chain as a win).
Effectively you put in on purpose bugs for an inspector to find so they don't dig too deep for difficult to solve problems.
What are the odds an insurer would reach for a lawyer? They probably have several on speed dial.
(OP mentions a lawyer in the title, but the post only speaks of a data protection officer, which is a very different role and doesn't even represent the organization's interests but, instead, the users', at least under GDPR where I'm from)
Lmao Apple will not do anything for actual malware when reported with receipts, besides sending you a form letter assuring you "experts will look into it, now fuck off" then never contact you again. Ask me how I know. To their credit, I suspected they ran it through useless rudimentary automated checks which passed and they were back in business like a day later.
If your expectation is they will do something about shitty coding practices half the App Store would be banned.
Ask while you are in an EU country, request appeal and initiate Out-of-court dispute resolution.
Or better yet: let the platform suck, and let this be the year of the linux desktop on iPhone :)
Generally speaking, I think case law has avoided shooting the messenger, but if you use your unauthorized access to find PII on minors, you may be setting yourself up for problems, regardless if the goal is merely dramatic effect. You can, instead, document everything and hypothesize the potential risks of the vulnerability without exposing yourself to accusation of wrongdoing.
For example, the article talks about registering divers. The author could ask permission from the next diver to attempt to set their password without reading their email, and that would clearly show the vulnerability. No kids "in harm's way".
This sounds like a cultural mismatch with their lawyers. Which is ironic, since the lawyers in question probably thought of themselves as being risk-averse and doing everything possible to protect the organisation's reputation.
And are you only talking about cybersecurity disclosure, liability, patent applications... And the scenario when you're both working for the same party, or opposing parties?
If you read enough lawyer messages (they show up on HN all the time) you will see they follow a pattern of looking tough, and increasingly threatening posture. But often, the laws they cite aren't applicable, and wouldn't hold up in court or public opinion.
And it takes years to prove that and be judged as not guilty, or if guilty (as OP would likely be for dumping the database), that the punishment should be nil due to the demonstrated good faith even if it technically violated a law
Wouldn't you say the threats are to be taken seriously in cases like OP's?
Based on your experience, do you think there are specific ways the author could have communicated differently to elicit a better response from the lawyers?
Some things I can see. I think the way the programmer worded this sounds adversarial; I wouldn't have written it that way, but ultimately, there is nothing wrong with it: "I am offering a window of 30 days from today the 28th of April 2025 for [the organization] to mitigate or resolve the vulnerability before I consider any public disclosure."
When the lawyer sent the NDA with extra steps: the programmer could have chosen to hire a lawyer at this point to get advice. Or they could ignore this entirely (with the risk that the lawyer may sue him?), or proceed to negotiate terms, which the programmer did (offering a different document to sign).
IIUC, at that point, the lawyer went away and it's likely they will never contact this guy again, unless he discloses their name publicly and trashes their security, at which point the lawyer might sue for defamation, etc.
Anyway, my take is that as soon as the programmer got a lawyer email reply (instead of the "CTO thanking him for responsible disclosure"), he should have talked to his own lawyer for advice. When I have situations similar to this, I use the lawyer as a sounding board. i ask questions like "What is the lawyer trying to get me to do here?" and "Why are they threatening me instead of thanking me", and "What would happen if I respond in this way".
Depending on what I learned from my lawyer I can take a number actions. For example, completely ignoring the company lawyer might be a good course of action. The company doesn't want to bring somebody to court then have everybody read in a newspaper that the company had shitty security. Or writing a carefully written threatening letter- "if you sue me, I'll countersue, and in discovery, you will look bad and lose". Or- and this is one of my favorite tricks, rewriting the document to what I wanted, signing that, sending it back to them. Again, for all of those, I'd talk to a lawyer and listen to their perspective carefully.
The article says that the organization refused the counter-offer and doubled down instead
> he should have talked to his own lawyer for advice
Costing how much? Next I'll need a lawyer for telling the supermarket that their alarm system code was being overlooked by someone from the bushes
It's not bad legal advice and I won't discourage anyone from talking to a lawyer, but it makes things way more costly than they need be. There's a thousand cases like this already online to be found if you want to know how to handle this type of response
Sounds very usa-esque (or perhaps unusually wealthy) to retain a lawyer as "sounding board"
Note that the post never mentions lawyers, only the title. It sounds to me like chatgpt came up with two dozen titles and OP thought this was the most dramatic one. In the post, they mention it was a data protection officer who replied. This person has the user's interests as their goal and works for the organization only insofar as that they handle GDPR-related matters, including complaints. If I'm reading it right, they're supposed to be somewhat impartial per recital 97 of the GDPR: "data protection officers [...] should be in a position to perform their duties and tasks in an independent manner"
They acknowledged it as a legitimate issue and marked my issue as 'useful info' but refused to pay me anything; they said that they would only pay if I physically demonstrate that it leads to a disruption of service; basically baiting me into doing something illegal! It was obvious from my description that this attack could easily be scaled up. I wasn't prepared to literally bring down the service to make my point. They didn't even offer the lowest tier of $200.
So bad. AI slop code is taking over the industry, vulnerabilities are popping up all over the place, so much so that companies are refusing to pay out bounties to humans. It's like neglect is being rewarded and diligence is being punished.
Then you read about how small the bug bounties are, even for established security researchers. It doesn't seem like a great industry. HackerOne seems like a honeypot to waste hackers' time. They reward a tiny number of hackers with big payouts to create PR to waste as many hackers' time as possible. Probably setting them up and collecting dirt on them behind the scenes. That's what it feels like at least.
I try to go into these things with zero expectations. Having a mediating party involved from the start is a bit like OP immediately CC'ing the CERT: extra legal steps in the disclosure process. Mediating parties are usually a pain to work with, and if it's deemed "out of scope" then they typically refuse to even notify the vulnerable party (or acknowledge to you that it hasn't been disclosed). I don't want a pay day, I just want them to fix their damn bug, but there's no way to report it besides through this middle person. Literally every time I've had to use a reporting procedure (like HackerOne) has resulted in tone-deaf responses from the company or complete gatekeeping. All of those bugs exist to this day. Every time I can email a human directly, it gets fixed, and in some occasions they send a thank-you like some swag and chocolates, a t-shirt, something
Based on what I hear in the community, my HackerOne experiences have been outliers, but it might still be more effective (if you're not looking to collect bounty money) to talk to organizations directly where possible and avoid the ones that use HackerOne or another mediation party
The lever lawyers have to “make it go away” is “law says so.” They’re not going to beg for mercy, they’re not going to invite you to coffee, no “bug bounty.” From their perspective if they arm-wrestle the researcher into an NDA, they patched the only known breach, retrospectively.
Perhaps it’s not prosocial or best practice, but you can clearly see how this went down from the company perspective, with a subject organization that has a tenuous grasp of cyber security concepts.
They’ll close a report as “no action” if the issue isn’t related to Microsoft products. That said, in my experience they’ve been a reasonable intermediary for a few incidents I’ve reported involving government websites, especially where Microsoft software was part of the stack in some way.
For example, I’ve reported issues in multiple countries where national ID numbers are sequential. Private companies like insurers, pension funds, and banks use those IDs to look up records, but some of them didn’t verify that the JSON Web Token (JWT) used for the session actually belonged to the person whose national ID was being queried. In practice, that meant an attacker could enumerate IDs and access other citizens’ financial and personal data.
Reporting something like that directly to a government agency can be intimidating, so I reported it to Microsoft instead, since these organizations often use Azure AD B2C for customer authentication. The vulnerability itself wasn’t in Microsoft’s products, but MSRC’s reactive engineers still took ownership of triage and helped route it to the right contacts in those agencies through their existing partnerships.
Besides, it's usually governmental organizations that do this sort of thing
The problem is this is literally a matter of national security, and currently we sacrifice national security for the convenience of wealthy companies.
Also, we all have our private data leaked multiple times per month. We see millions of people having their private information leaked by these companies, and there are zero consequences. Currently, the companies say, "Well, it's our code, it's our responsibility; nobody is allowed to research or test the security of our code because it is our code and it is our responsibility." But then, when they leak the entire nation's private data, it's no longer their responsibility. They're not liable.
As security issues continue to become a bigger and bigger societal problem, remember that we are choosing to hamstring our security researchers. We can make a different choice and decide we want to utilize our security researchers instead, for the benefit of all and for better national security. It might cause some embarrassment for companies though, so I'm not holding my breath.
I have a radical idea which goes even further: we should have legaly mandated bug bounties. A law which says that if someone makes a proper disclosure of an actual exploitable security problem then your company has to pay out. Ideally we could scale the payout based on the importance of the infrastructure in question. Vulnerabilities with little lasting consequence would pay little. Serious vulnerabilities with potential to society wide physical harm could pay out a few percents of the yearly revenue of the given company. For example hacking the high score in a game would pay only little, a vulnerability which can collapse the electric grid or remotely command a car would pay a king’s ransom. Enough to incentivise a cottage industry to find problems. Hopefully resulting in a situation where the companies in question find it more profitable to find and fix the problems themselves.
I’m sure there is a potential to a lot of unintended consequences. For example i’m not sure how could we handle insider threats. One one hand insider threats are real and the companies should be protecting against them as best as they could. On the other hand it would be perverse to force companies to pay developers for vulnerabilities the developers themselves intentionally created.
So you never report to actual organization but to the security organization, like you did. And they would be more equiped to deal with this, maybe also validate how serious this issue is. Assign a reward as well.
So you are researcher, you report your thing and can't be sued or bullied by organization that is offending in the first place.
Right now the climate in the world is whistleblowers get their careers and livihoods ended. This has been going on for quite a while.
The only practical advice is ignore it exists, refuse to ever admit to having found a problem and move on. Leave zero paper trail or evidence. It sucks but its career ending to find these things and report them.
Additionally, MITRE doesn’t coordinate a release date with you. They can be slow to respond sometimes but in the end you just tell them to set the CVE to public at some date and they’ll do it. You’re also free to publish information on the vulnerability before MITRE assigned a CVE.
The idea is to make it easier to fix the vulnerability than to sue to shut people up.
For credit assignment, the person could direct people to the non profit’s website which would confirm discovery by CVE without exposing too many details that would allow the company to come after the individual.
This business of going to the company directly and hoping they don’t sue you is bananas in my opinion.
Also, it would prevent researchers from gaining public credit and reputation for their work. This seems to be a big motivator for many.
So it sort of makes sense that companies would go on the attack because there's a risk that their insurance company will catch wind and they'll be on the hook.
By the way, I had a story when I accidentally hacked an online portal in our school. It didn't go much and I was "caught" but anyways. This is how we learn to be more careful.
I believe in every single system like that it's fairly possible to find a vulnerability. Nobody cares about them and people that make those systems don't have enough skill to do it right. Data is going to be leaked. That's the unfortunate truth. It gets worse with the come of AI. Since it has zero understanding of what it is actually it will make mistakes that would cause more data leaks.
Even if you don't consider yourself as an evil person, would you still stay the same knowing real security vulnerability? Who knows. Some might take advantage. Some won't and still be punished for doing everything as the "textbook way".
A) in EU; GDPR will trump whatever BS they want to try B) no confirmation affected users were notified C) aggro threats D) nonsensical threats, sourced to Data Privacy Officer w/seemingly 0 scruples and little experience
Due to B), there's a strong responsibility rationale.
Due to rest, there's a strong name and shame rationale. Sort of equivalent to a bad Yelp review for a restaurant, but for SaaS.
He did everything exactly by the book and in the end was even nice enough to not publish the company's name, despite the legal threat being bullshit and him being entirely in the right.
Edit: I looked into it a bit and things seems to check out, this person has scuba diving certifications on their LinkedIn and the site seems real and high-effort. While I also don’t have solid proof that it’s not AI generated either, making accusations like this based on no evidence doesn’t seem good at all
You can also see the format and pacing differs greatly from posts on their blog made before LLMs were mainstream, e.g. https://dixken.de/blog/monitoring-dremel-digilab-3d45
While I wouldn't go so far as to say the post is entirely made up (it's possible the underlying story is true) - I would say that it's very likely that OP used an LLM to edit/write the post.
I also enjoy all the "vibes" people list out for why they can tell, as though there was any rhyme or reason to what they're saying. Models change and adapt daily so the "heading structure" or "numbered list" ideas become outdated as you're typing them.
Nothing in the original message refers to it being clickbait, the core complaint is the LLM-like tone and the lack of substance, which you also just threw it there without references ironically.
> What, exactly, is the problem with disclosing the nature of the article for people who wish to avoid spending their time in that way?
It's alright as long as it's not based on faith or guesswork.
[1] Unlike LLM-generated articles, posting LLM-generated comments is actually against the rules.
You also have to take into account that the medium is the message[1]. In a nutshell, the more people read LLM generated posts and interact with chatbots, the higher the influence of LLM style in their writing -- the whole "delve" comes to mind, and double dashes. So even if you have a machine that correctly identified LLM generated posts, you can't be sure it'll keep working.
[1] https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf
Let's say you are the LLM detecting genius you paint yourself to be. Well guess what? You're human and you're going to make mistakes, if you haven't made a bunch of them already. So if you have nothing better to add to a post than to guess this, you probably shouldn't say anything at all. Like you said, it's not even against the rules.
The same could be said of the accusation being levied here.
Your firebrand attitude is doing a disservice to everyone who takes vibe hunting vibecraft seriously!
The intended audience doesn’t even care that this is LLM-assisted writing. Whether the narrative is affected by AI is second to the technical details. This is technical documentation communicated through a narrative, not personal narrative about someone’s experience with a technical problem. There’s a difference!
What are you in this for?!
I assure you, the incompetence in both securing systems and operating these vulnerability management systems and programs is everywhere. You don't need an LLM to make it up.
(my experience is roughly a decade in cybersecurity and risk management, ymmv)
Regarding your allergy, my best guess is that it is generated by Claude, not ChatGPT, and they have different tells, so you may be sensitive to one but not the other. Regarding plausibility, that's the thing that LLMs excel at. I do agree it is very plausible.
I saw one or two sigils (ex. a little eager to jump to lists)
It certainly has real substance and detail.
It's not, like, generic LinkedIn post quality.
You could tl;dr it to "autoincrementing user ids and a default password set = vulnerability, and the company responded poorly." and react as "Jeez, what a waste of time, I've heard 1000 of these stories."
I don't think that reaction is wrong, per se, and I understand the impulse. I feel this sort of thing more and more as I get older.
But, it fitting into a condensed structure you're familiar with isn't the same as "this is boring slop." Moby Dick is a book about some guy who wants revenge, Hamlet is about a king who dies.
Additionally, I don't think what people will interpret from what you wrote is what you meant, necessarily. Note the other reply at this time, you're so confident and dismissive that they assume you're indicating the article should be removed from HN.
Am I the only one who can't stand this AI slop pattern?
ai;dr
This is AI slop.
Use your own words!
I would rather read the original prompt!
Based on this interaction, you have wonder what it's like to file a claim with them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7NsjpiPK7o
Insurance company would not cover a decompression chamber for someone who has severe decompression sickness, it is a life-threatening condition that requires immediate remediation.
The idea that you possible neurological DCS and you must argue on the phone with an insurance rep about if you need to be life-flighted to the nearest chamber is just.... Mind blowing
Why does he think he's entitled to do this? I get that his intentions are more or less good but don't see that as much excuse. What did he expect them to say? "Oh thank you wise and wonderful full-time Linux Platform Engineer"?
I appreciate that the web site in question seems to have absolutely pathetic security practices. Good reason not to do business with them. Not a good reason to do something that, in many jurisdictions at least, sounds like it constitutes a crime.
1) If you make legal disclosure too hard, the only way you will find out is via criminals.
2) If other industries worked like this, you could sue an architect who discovered a flaw in a skyscraper. The difference is that knowledge of a bad foundation doesn’t inherently make a building more likely to collapse, while knowledge of a cyber vulnerability is an inherent risk.
3) Random audits by passers-by is way too haphazard. If a website can require my real PII, I should be able to require that PII is secure. I’m not sure what the full list of industries would be, but insurance companies should be categorically required to have an cyber audit, and laws those same laws should protect white hats from lawyers and allow class actions from all users. That would change the incentives so that the most basic vulnerabilities are gone, and software engineers become more economical than lawyers.
For people unfamiliar, most engineers aren't professional engineers. There are more legal standards for your average engineer and they are legally obligated to push back against management when they think there's danger or ethics violations, but that's a high bar and very few ever get in legal trouble, only the most egregious cases. But professional engineers are the ones who check all the plans and the inspections. They're more like a supervisor. Someone who can look at the whole picture. And they get paid a lot more for their work but they're also essential to making sure things are safe. They also end up having a lot of power/authority, though at the cost of liability. Think like how in the military a doctor can overrule all others (I'm sure you've seen this in a movie). Your average military doctor or nurse can't do that but the senior ones can, though it's rare and very circumstantial.
Having worked in low-level embedded systems that could be considered "system critical", it's a horrible feeling knowing what's in that code and having no actual recourse other than quitting (which I have done on few occasions because I did not want to be tied to that disaster waiting to happen).
I actually started a legal framework and got some basic bills together (mostly wording) and presented this to many of my colleagues, all agreed it was needed and loved it, and a few lawyers said the bill/framework was sound .. even had some carve-outs for "mom-n-pops" and some other "obvious" things (like allowing for a transition into it).
Why didn't I push it through? 2 reasons:
1.) I'd likely be blackballed (if not outright killed) because "the powers that be" (e.g. large corp's in software) would absolutely -hate- this ... having actual accountability AND having to pay higher wages.
2.) Doing what I wanted would require federal intervention, and the climate has not been ripe for new regulations, let alone governing bodies, in well over a decade.
Hell, I even tried to get my PE in Software, but right as I was going to start the process, the PE for Software was removed from my state (and isn't likely to ever come back).
I 100% agree we should have even a PE for Software, but it's not likely to happen any time soon because Software without accountability and regulation makes WAY too much money ... :(
I worked as a physical engineer previously and I think the existence of PEs changes the nature of the game. I felt much more empowered to "talk back" to my boss and question them. It was natural to do that and even encouraged. If something is wrong everyone wants to know. It is worth disruption and even dealing with naive young engineers than it is to harm someone. It is also worth doing because it makes those engineers learn faster and it makes the products improve faster (insights can come from anywhere).
Part of the reason I don't associate my name with my account is so that I can talk more freely. I absolutely love software (and yes, even AI, despite what some might think given my comments) but I do really dislike how much deception there is in our industry. I do think it is on us as employees to steer the ship. If we don't think about what we're building and the consequences of them then our ship is beholden to the tides, not us. It is up to us to make the world a better place. It is up to us to make sure that our ship is headed towards utopia rather than dystopia (even if both are more of an idea than reality). I'd argue that if it were up to the tides then we'll end up crashing into the rocks. It's much easier to avoid that if we're managing the ship routinely than in a panic when we're headed in that direction. I think software has the capacity to make the world a far better place. That we can both do good and make money at the same time. But I also think the system naturally will disempower us. When we fight against the tides things are naturally harder and may even look like we're moving slower. But I think we often confuse speed and velocity, frankly, because direction is difficult to understand or predict. Still, it is best that we try our best and not just abdicate those decisions. The world is complex, so when things work they are in an unstable equilibrium. Which means small perturbations knock us off. Like one ship getting stuck shutting down a global economy. So it takes a million people and a billion tiny actions to make things go right and stay right (easier to stay than fix). But many of the problems we hate and are frustrated by are more stable states. Things like how wealth pools up, gathered by only a few. How power does the same. And so on. Obviously my feelings extend beyond software engineering, but my belief is that if we want the world to be a better place it takes all of us. The more that are willing to do something, the easier it gets. I'd also argue that most people don't need to do anything that difficult. The benefit and detriment of a complex machine is that small actions have larger consequences. Just because you're a small cog doesn't mean you have no power. You don't need to be a big cog to change the world, although you're unlikely to get recognition.
We’d actually have to respect software development as an important task and not a cost to be minimized and outsourced.
you could do that with civil engineering. anyone gets to design bridges. bridge is done we inspect, sorry x isn’t redundant your engineering is bad tear it down.
I absolutely do not want to gatekeep beginners from being able to publish their work on the open internet, but I often wonder if we should require some sort of certification and insurance for large businesses sites that handle personal info or money. There'd be a Certified Professional Software Engineer that has to sign off on it, and thus maybe has the clout to push back on being forced to implement whatever dumb idea an MBA has to drive engagement or short-term sales.
Maybe. Its not like its worked very well lately for Boeing or Volkswagen.
https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-makes-history-w...
But also maybe hobbyists don't have any business storing PII at scale just like they have no business building public bridges or commercial aircraft.
It is also a matter of respect towards professionals. If civil engineer says that something is illegal/dangerous/unfeasible their word is taken into the account and not dismissed - unlike in, broadly speaking, IT.
I, as a self-proclaimed dictator of my empire, require all chat applications developed or deployed in my empire to send copies of all chat messages to the National Archive for backup in a readable form. I appoint Professional Software Engineers to inspect and certify apps to actually do that. Distribution of non-certified applications to the public or other forms of their deployment is prohibited and is punishable by jail time.
Sounds familiar?
PII isn't nearly as big a deal as a life tbh. I'd rather not gatekeep PII handling behind degrees. I want more accoubtability, but PEs for software seems like it's ill-suited for the problem. Principally, software is ever evolving and distributed. A building or bridge is mostly done.
A PR is not evaluated in a vacuum
> If other industries worked like this, you could sue an architect who discovered a flaw in a skyscraper
To match this metaphor to TFA, the architect has to break in to someone else's apartment to prove there's a flaw. IANAL but I'm not positive that "I'm an architect and I noticed a crack in my apartment, so I immediately broke in to the apartments of three neighbours to see if they also had cracks" would be much of a defence against a trespass/B&E charge.
Given that this is Malta in particular, the author probably wants to avoid going there for a bit. It's a country full of organized crime and corruption where people like him would end up with convenient accidents.