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“We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”

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Re: “We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep thinking we need some sort of new license for open source that limits which entities can use the software based on their net worth or the networth of their shareholders. That might be a new license, but it is by definition not open source. And, no, companies like Google won't “automatically” buy commercial software with that style of license; from their perspective it's worse than regular commercial software…

This is totally incorrect about the licensing models of open source.

I can only guess what you might think is wrong, but if you think it is the description of the proposed license as not-open-source, I would direct you to paragraphs 5 & 6 of the Open Source Definition.

https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

Re: “We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR max fine is (iirc) 4% of revenue. So if you are a small fish you will be paying less then the big fish. Also the fines are for wilful failure to comply, if you accidentally broke GDPR then your first offence is going to be more a slap on the wrist then an instant 4%.

Except it says "whichever" is higher, so if they decided to fine you 10 million or 2% of revenue, and your 2% is much lower than 10 million, guess which one you're paying... > Up to €10 million, or 2% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher See: https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/fines-and-penalties/

_Up to_. It's subject to various considerations (Article 83):

> (1) Each supervisory authority shall ensure that the imposition of administrative fines [shall] be effective, proportionate and dissuasive.

> (2) [...] When deciding whether to impose an administrative fine and deciding on the amount of the administrative fine in each individual case due regard shall be given to the following:

> the nature, gravity and duration of the infringement taking into account the nature scope or purpose of the processing concerned as well as the number of data subjects affected and the level of damage suffered by them;

> the intentional or negligent character of the infringement;

> any action taken by the controller or processor to mitigate the damage suffered by data subjects;

> the degree of responsibility of the controller or processor taking into account technical and organisational measures implemented by them pursuant to Articles 25 and 32;

> any relevant previous infringements by the controller or processor [and other specified criteria]

> (8) The exercise by the supervisory authority of its powers under this Article shall be subject to appropriate procedural safeguards in accordance with Union and Member State law, including effective judicial remedy and due process.

They can't just arbitrarily decide to fine you the maximum.

Re: “We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”

#154
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Squid is vastly under-equipped to deal with the security hygiene needed for a project this important. That's the tragedy of the open source world : mission critical for everyone, but no actor willing to maintain it properly. It's Heartbleed all over again.

I keep thinking we need some sort of new license for open source that limits which entities can use the software based on their net worth or the networth of their shareholders. That way large companies like Google can automatically fund these long tail of projects without burdening casual hackers or startups with unnecessary costs.

That is a recipe for an ambitious PM in the corp to just make their own version, tailored for their 1 of 10 companies in the world needs. Once you start getting that big, build starts becoming cheaper than buy for critical infra.

Re: “We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You achieve that compliance by paying HackerOne, as a company, to perform a compliance scan. This does not mean any swinging dick that reports a vulnerability through HackerOne is causing PayPal to fall out of compliance. These scans are planned well in advance and are part of a normal audit cycle. (edit: typo) On top of that, there's not really any legal issues for being non-compliant, as has been pointed out elsewh…

As someone who deals with PCI-DSS compliance in fintech land on a daily basis this thread is showing me there are a lot of people who like to crow on about stuff they don't know a thing about.

Indeed. However, it's refreshing to see a HN thread that's defending vendor snakeoil instead of assuming all infosec is vendor snakeoil.

Re: “We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their full "out of scope" list also includes MITM attacks, which would exclude most of what's in this article. I guess my confusion now is why PayPal even purports to offer bug bounties if they're going to craft an "out of scope" list that allows them to reject every submitted report.

> I guess my confusion now is why PayPal even purports to offer bug bounties if they're going to craft an "out of scope" list that allows them to reject every submitted report. They're not; you're just choosing to assume bad things about them. Their out-of-scope list is fairly standard. If you asked a guy on the street "what would hacking PayPal look like?", the answer they imagined would probably be in scope. For ex…

> automatically sends $500 to my PayPal account, that’s in scope.

Nope. From the out of scope list:

> Attacks involving payment fraud, theft, or malicious merchant accounts

Re: “We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it says "whichever" is higher, so if they decided to fine you 10 million or 2% of revenue, and your 2% is much lower than 10 million, guess which one you're paying... > Up to €10 million, or 2% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher See: https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/fines-and-penalties/

GDPR breach fines are discretionary rather than mandatory. They must be imposed on a case-by-case basis and should be “effective, proportionate and dissuasive”. Fining a small mom and pop site 20 mill (20mil/4% is the highest fine depending on the case) is not proportionate, not effective because I would like to see them actually collect on that and I would say such a fine to a mom and pop would be dissuasive of doin…

>I would say such a fine to a mom and pop would be dissuasive of doing business at all

Welcome to the EU. They've pulled these stunts before. When they introduced changes to digital VAT collection the lawmakers "forgot" that VAT has exemption thresholds. This effectively barred some small and micro businesses from selling their digital services/goods to other EU countries, because the business would not have been exempt from VAT afterwards. It took the lawmakers years to implement a minimum VAT threshold.

>It’s not like they run every mom and pop site out of the country.

Of course they won't, because people want to do business. There will always be more businesses that get started. The question is whether there will be fewer businesses started because of the regulation. So far analysis after GDPR points to yes.

Re: “We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”

#158
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it says "whichever" is higher, so if they decided to fine you 10 million or 2% of revenue, and your 2% is much lower than 10 million, guess which one you're paying... > Up to €10 million, or 2% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher See: https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/fines-and-penalties/

They key part there is "if they decide to fine you...". The max(€10m, 2%) and max(€20m, 4%) are the most that supervisory authorities may issue as fines. But supervisory authorities have a legal duty to issue fines that are proportional which means than unless you breach the GDPR in a wilful and egregious manner you're unlikely to be fined that much (and if you are you can appeal the fine to a court who would reduce…

But since we're talking about small sites and small businesses, how many of these will actually be able to afford to go to court to argue this? In every system mistakes are made and corruption exists. Why word it in a way that seems to increase the likelihood of both?

Re: “We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”

#160

From PayPal's response to a 2FA bypass: > If the attacker has the victim's password, they would already be able to gain access to the account via web UI too. As such, the account is already compromised. As such, there does not appear to be any security implications as a direct result of this behavior. Seriously? This means PayPal's 2FA is just security theater. I'd rather they didn't offer it at all in this case, at…

From reading a different article, the terminology seems to be a bone of contention here. This ’2FA' is an email message PayPal send when they detect a new login location. They do not call it 2FA and they do offer actual 2FA that cybernews have not bypassed.

Actually, PayPal recently added proper TOTP 2FA.
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