JFC bug bounty money is pathetic now. This would have destroyed this company's reputation, downstream effects for customer reputations and data.
We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
21–30 of 453 posts
Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
#22This feels so emblematic of our current era. VC funded vibe coded AI documentation startup somehow gets big name customers who don't properly vet the security of the platform, ship a massive vulnerability that could pwn millions of users and the person who reports the vulnerability gets...$5k.
If I recall last week Mintlify wrote a blog post showcasing their impressive(ly complicated) caching architecture. Pretending like they were doing real engineering, when it turns out nobody there seems to know what they're doing, but they've managed to convince some big names to use them.
Man, it's like everything I hate about modern tech. Good job Eva for finding this one. Starting to think that every AI startup or company that is heavily using gen-ai for coding is probably extremely vulnerable to the simplest of attacks. Might be a way to make some extra spending money lol.
Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
#23Proxying from the "hot" domain (with user credentials) to a third party service is always going to be an awful idea. Why not just CNAME Mintlify to dev-docs.discord.com or something? This is also why an `app.` or even better `tenant.` subdomain is always a good idea; it limits the blast radius of mistakes like this.
I think the reason companies do this for doc sites is so they can substitute your real credentials into code snippets with "YOUR_API_KEY". Seems like a poor tradeoff given the security downside.
Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
#24The fact that SVG files can contain scripts was a bit of a mistake. On one hand, the animations and entire interactive demos and even games in a single SVG are cool. But on the other hand, it opens up a serious can of worms of security vulnerabilities. As a result, SVG files are often banned from various image upload tools, they do not unfurl previews, and so on. If you upload an SVG to discord, it just shows the raw…
> On one hand, the animations and entire interactive demos and even games in a single SVG are cool. But on the other hand
Didn’t we do this already with Flash? Why would this lesson not have stuck?
Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
#25Cool bug. Bug bounty money is pathetic.
I was going to ask. Isn't 4k from Discord pretty low for the work conducted here? I'm not familiar with bounty payouts. I'm hoping these companies aren't taking advantage of them.
4k is sadly discords highest bounty they give out (screenshot from their bugcrowd program: https://imgur.com/a/KNIdeXh) even more critical issues then this one get paid the same amount out
Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
#26The fact that SVG files can contain scripts was a bit of a mistake. On one hand, the animations and entire interactive demos and even games in a single SVG are cool. But on the other hand, it opens up a serious can of worms of security vulnerabilities. As a result, SVG files are often banned from various image upload tools, they do not unfurl previews, and so on. If you upload an SVG to discord, it just shows the raw…
All SVGs should be properly sanitized going into a backend and out of it and when rendered on a page. Do you allow SVGs to be uploaded anywhere on your site? This is a PSA that you're probably at risk unless you can find the few hundred lines of code doing the sanitization. Note to Ruby on Rails developers, your active storage uploaded SVGs are not sanitized by default.
just run them through `svgo` and get the benefits of smaller filesizes as well
Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
#27The fact that SVG files can contain scripts was a bit of a mistake. On one hand, the animations and entire interactive demos and even games in a single SVG are cool. But on the other hand, it opens up a serious can of worms of security vulnerabilities. As a result, SVG files are often banned from various image upload tools, they do not unfurl previews, and so on. If you upload an SVG to discord, it just shows the raw…
Would it be possible for messenger apps to simply ignore tags (and accept that this will break a small fraction of SVGs)? Or is that not a sufficient defense?
I looked into it for work at some point as we wanted to support SVG uploads. Stripping is not enough to have an inert file. Scripts can also be attached as attributes. If you want to prevent external resources it gets more complex.
The only reliable solution would be an allowlist of safe elements and attributes, but it would quickly cause compat issues unless you spend time curating the rules. I did not find an existing lib doing it at the time, and it was too much effort to maintain it ourselves.
The solution I ended up implementing was having a sandboxed Chromium instance and communicating with it through the dev tools to load the SVG and rasterize it. This allowed uploading SVG files, but it was then served as rasterized PNGs to other users.
Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
#28Slightly related, as someone who doesn’t engage in this type of work, I’m curious about the potential risks associated with discovering, testing, and searching for security bugs. While it’s undoubtedly positive that this individual ultimately became a responsible person and disclosed the information, what if they hadn’t? Furthermore, on Discord’s side, what if they were unaware of this person and encountered someone attempting to snoop on this information, mistakenly believing them to be up to no good? Has there been cases where the risk involved wasn’t justified by the relatively low $4k reward? Or any specific companies you wouldn’t want to do this with because of a past incident with them?
Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
#29The fact that SVG files can contain scripts was a bit of a mistake. On one hand, the animations and entire interactive demos and even games in a single SVG are cool. But on the other hand, it opens up a serious can of worms of security vulnerabilities. As a result, SVG files are often banned from various image upload tools, they do not unfurl previews, and so on. If you upload an SVG to discord, it just shows the raw…
All SVGs should be properly sanitized going into a backend and out of it and when rendered on a page. Do you allow SVGs to be uploaded anywhere on your site? This is a PSA that you're probably at risk unless you can find the few hundred lines of code doing the sanitization. Note to Ruby on Rails developers, your active storage uploaded SVGs are not sanitized by default.
GitLab has some code in their repo if you want to see how to do it.
Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
#30$11k in bounties. Might have got more from the onion.
Stupid, especially because he is a kid and young in his career.
His lifetime earnings and ability to score a better paying job is worth way more than an extra couple thousand dollars selling this kind of exploit to criminals. It's why NDA's for security vulnerabilities are harmful because it doesn't allow a kind of social credit accumulation