I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
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Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
#2I’ve worked in I.T. For nearly 3 decades, and I’m still astounded by the disconnect between security best practices, often with serious legal muscle behind them, and the reality of how companies operate.
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.
Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
#3Wish they named them. Usually I don't recommend it. But the combination of:
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.
Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
#4> Instead, I offered to sign a modified declaration confirming data deletion. I had no interest in retaining anyone’s personal data, but I was not going to agree to silence about the disclosure process itself.
Why sign anything at all? The company was obviously not interested in cooperation, but in domination.
Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
#5I think the problem is the process. Each country should have a reporting authority and it should be the one to deal with security issues.
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.
Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
#6This is an LLM-generated article, for anyone who might wish to save the "15 min read" labelled at the top. Recounts an entirely plausible but possibly completely made up narrative of incompetent IT, and contains no real substance.
Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
#7I’ve worked in I.T. For nearly 3 decades, and I’m still astounded by the disconnect between security best practices, often with serious legal muscle behind them, and the reality of how companies operate. 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 leader…
> By even flagging the issue and the potential fallout, I’ve put my career at risk.
Simple as. Not your company? not your problem? Notify, move on.
Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
#8This is an LLM-generated article, for anyone who might wish to save the "15 min read" labelled at the top. Recounts an entirely plausible but possibly completely made up narrative of incompetent IT, and contains no real substance.
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Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
#9I’ve worked in I.T. For nearly 3 decades, and I’m still astounded by the disconnect between security best practices, often with serious legal muscle behind them, and the reality of how companies operate. 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 leader…
> These are the sort of things that are supposed to lead to commendations and promotions. Maybe I live in fantasyland.
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.
Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
#10This is an LLM-generated article, for anyone who might wish to save the "15 min read" labelled at the top. Recounts an entirely plausible but possibly completely made up narrative of incompetent IT, and contains no real substance.
How do you know? Some of the text has a slightly LLM-ish flavour to it (e.g. the numbered lists) but other than that I don’t see any solid evidence of that
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