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Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

digit.fyi

111–120 of 178 posts

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#111
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hyperbolic nonsense. Having worked at AWS, I've never encountered a business that is more serious about their security position.

It's not, I still have the email exchange from a couple years back - I thought of posting it somewhere because it was so odd, but I dont have a blog and I am not interested in publicity. Amazon still doesn't offer a bug bounty program to my knowledge. Also, it's the only cloud provider my active security researcher friends tell me that attempts to regulate them by some weird pen test authorization requirements which…

There’s no way that would be their reason.

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#112
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, I still have the email exchange from a couple years back - I thought of posting it somewhere because it was so odd, but I dont have a blog and I am not interested in publicity. Amazon still doesn't offer a bug bounty program to my knowledge. Also, it's the only cloud provider my active security researcher friends tell me that attempts to regulate them by some weird pen test authorization requirements which…

> pen test authorization requirements Yes, we don't want people to publicize when we fuck up so we'd rather just NDA them to death when they tell us about bugs. Edit: If you don't accept, we just use the hacking laws in the US to silence you.

Well, you’re not entitled to conduct attacks on them at all, so why shouldn’t the terms be up to them?

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#113
post #33

Pro tip if you are a startup and want free security advice. Just sign up for all the bounty sites and for every single bounty just tell the submitter that it is a duplicate bug and pay them nothing, then hot patch it immediately and when they get suspicious tell them that their bug report had absolutely nothing to do with the timing of your patch. I know there are companies that do this because I have had it happen t…

Sounds like an actual use case for staking - bug bounties on teh blockchain!

Hopefully, probably sarcastic, but just in case you're not: who puts the data on the blockchain?

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#114
post #93
post #33

Pro tip if you are a startup and want free security advice. Just sign up for all the bounty sites and for every single bounty just tell the submitter that it is a duplicate bug and pay them nothing, then hot patch it immediately and when they get suspicious tell them that their bug report had absolutely nothing to do with the timing of your patch. I know there are companies that do this because I have had it happen t…

There is actually a very simple solution to this: publish a Merkel tree of submitted bug reports.

How would that work? Surely the company could make a fake duplicate and show it to you in a Merkle tree as "proof"? They literally make up every node in the Merkle tree after all.

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the automated reports a bit more? What makes them uninteresting?

Examples of "vulnerability" reports I've received: - Dump of CVEs for "Web App X" or "Server X", even though literally zero of them apply to the version that I'm currently running. - Dumps of port scans with warnings like "Running SSH on port 22 is not recommended" and "Server accepts HTTP. Always use HTTPS". I assume there are tools that generate these reports because the reports use decent English but the accompany…

What's the justification for running a host that responds to HTTP and doesn't immediately upgrade to HTTPS?

I'm having a hard time imagining a scenario where I manage a web server that is accessible to anonymous people running pen scanners on it that has a justifiable reason for broadcasting port 80.

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#116
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, security has much fewer of those resources. Most of the information seems to shared through word-of-mouth, conference presentations, and blog posts.

Much of the information is also just RTFM. I don't think it's a stretch to say that security is a lifestyle: if I read the documentation of an API, more often than not I'll wonder if something can be abused for something. Or when trying to register for health insurance, the password field required special characters, so I set my password generator to include them, after which the form broke, and so I investigated and…

And experience. Knowing what to look for, even if it's just the HTML source of a web page, is rather important in the first steps of breaking the system. How do you learn what to look for? Well, certainly there are blog posts and even playgrounds with virtual systems and components one can have a go at.

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples of "vulnerability" reports I've received: - Dump of CVEs for "Web App X" or "Server X", even though literally zero of them apply to the version that I'm currently running. - Dumps of port scans with warnings like "Running SSH on port 22 is not recommended" and "Server accepts HTTP. Always use HTTPS". I assume there are tools that generate these reports because the reports use decent English but the accompany…

What's the justification for running a host that responds to HTTP and doesn't immediately upgrade to HTTPS? I'm having a hard time imagining a scenario where I manage a web server that is accessible to anonymous people running pen scanners on it that has a justifiable reason for broadcasting port 80.

No that's the point, the generation script recognizes that the server issues an HTTP-compliant response (which 301 Moved Permanently is) on port 80 and dumbly generates that false-positive, not understanding that the only responses on port 80 are to upgrade to HTTPS.

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#120
post #33

Pro tip if you are a startup and want free security advice. Just sign up for all the bounty sites and for every single bounty just tell the submitter that it is a duplicate bug and pay them nothing, then hot patch it immediately and when they get suspicious tell them that their bug report had absolutely nothing to do with the timing of your patch. I know there are companies that do this because I have had it happen t…

I don't doubt this has happened but also just as likely they did know about it but some dumbass product owner decided it wasn't a high priority until someone external reported it. My company has hundreds of similar (not just security) issues just lying around.
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