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Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

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Re: Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

#111
post #30

There is going to be a flurry of this sort of stuff as the AIs get smart enough to find them. It will naturally die down as the legitimate ones are fixed. Yes, there will always be some level of this, but I’d expect it to be low and the exploits found to be increasingly complex. This is a time of transition.

Honestly execution complexity is over time becoming a lower and lower barrier too.

Re: Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

#112
post #94

> At the time I post these, none have been reported. Feel free to report them yourself and take credit for the CVE if handed out lulz. I do this so to allure people into the field, and I've always found this is the most efficient way. I've been a skiddy, he would have believed this. Thankfully, I've grown a bit, and can see this for the transparent, "I'm angry and want to hurt others so I will feel a little less alon…

How bad are your security practices that these tiny obscure things matter? None of these findings that show up here on HN should even make you flinch. The alarmist takes on this stuff is fucking exhausting and I'm tired of security teams bugging me about it. Do your job and this shit doesn't matter AT ALL.

I said "doesn't matter" to someone once... the resulting lesson came in the form of a reply from the whitehat researcher (waves, hi brian!) a 16step exploit chain resulting in a one click full account takeover.

I'm equally annoyed and over the alarmist takes. But I don't think it's fair to group mine into it. I'm annoyed at seeing discard respect for others into the same void everyone is happy to toss quality.

Do these tiny things matter? No, not to the default-panic-level everyone adopts when they see 0day, or CVE... but duh, I'm now just repeating exactly what you already said. That no, for the record is mostly because I don't use any of these, not just because they're boring exploits. While I always look, I default assume anything CVE is boring/pointless. But I still read them.

But then, I'm not trying to convince the owner of the repo. I'm trying to discourage the theme among researchers that "no one cares", because I have seen researchers disclose bugs publicly, that we'd be eager to pay out on, because they disagreed with the decision on their last report.

I've fixed bugs being actively exploited against our users, that was found/fixed only after a whitehat report for something adjacent (we pay on those btw, and you should too). I don't wanna live in the world where it's easier for the bad guys, the only way we get there is once "everyone knows", you gotta report the all bugs that you can turn into an exploit. I don't want "the whitehat researcher culture" to move towards, who cares' dump the PoC on github, screw anyone that could be hurt by the bad guys, they deserve to be punished for the incompetence of others. SWE's are shit at security, security researchers are shit at SWE, the only way we get the good outcome, is if they're willing (and encouraged) to work together.

Re: Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"one ought to design systems under the assumption that the enemy will immediately gain full familiarity with them" - Claude Shannon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle

If you believe this, then why did you say? > starting to think security through obscurity might not be a bad thing

Because of asymmetric differences, I don't have access to powerful LLMs but attackers might. And also the complexities of software dependencies (supply chain vulnerabilities), my software depends on packages not in my control and I don't have time to audit the entire stack.

Re: Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be an em-dash user, but now my opinion is that I’d rather be perceived as someone who does not want to be confused with an LLM. So I’ve changed my writing style.

They're just so handy! I do think LLMs tend to use them in a specific way, though. So maybe tweaking your usage (ex. no spaces around them) or using a technically incorrect en-dash might offer the desired effect while subtly signaling that your message isn't AI-generated. I still use them — mostly for pauses — but I'd like to think my voice sounds distinct enough from an AI that people can tell.

I for one am striving for clarity and couldn't care less about being confused with AI.

However I've only ever used regular dashes. How do you type an em-dash? Is it OS specific? I've taken to using Emacs insert-char with a list of frequently used ones in my scratch buffer. My memory for Unicode is unreliable.

Re: Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

#115
post #106
post #100

I want to rush to git clone, but as things are, the odds are extremely high that this kind of things that are too good to be real are honeypots and something there will compromise your machine or make your llm start working for someone else...

Then, don't rush and take a few minutes to set up a virtual machine.

What about all the virtual machine zero days?

Re: Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

#116
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, big pet peeve of the new world. Every em dash is apparently an AI trigger. Back in my day, they were a sign of great respect within my people.

I used to be an em-dash user, but now my opinion is that I’d rather be perceived as someone who does not want to be confused with an LLM. So I’ve changed my writing style.

Code switching in the post LLM era.

Re: Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

#117
Went over a few of these with a pretty keen eye, and they aren't that particularly interesting. The Docker one is just a weird bug, it's not a vulnerability, and certainly not a "0-day" (which is a pretty loaded term and people expect bad stuff to happen).

The nghttp2 nghttpx one is more interesting, and could potentially be used for phishing, but it's very hard to line up properly because the request queue is non-deterministic so basically impossible to target a specific victim (assuming proxy traffic).

The VLC one is just a straight-up crash/bug. And VLC crashes all the time when using weird codecs, so that's nothing new.

Am I missing something here?

Re: Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need our infrastructure to stop treating bank account numbers and social security numbers as secrets. At least in the US, bank account numbers appear on physical checks and are required to be shared in order to do an ACH transfer, and a social security number is not supposed to be used as an identifier (unless to the Social Security Administration itself) or as a secret password. Ideally, nothing nefarious should…

Hang on, can you actually do something nefarious with just the bank account number?

AFAIK that's US thing. In normal countries bank account numbers are not a secret. The worst thing that can happen is someone sending you money.

Re: Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

#119
post #17

I took a look at the Ghidra ones (because I use Ghidra), and I'm unimpressed: https://github.com/bikini/exploitarium/blob/main/ghidra-12.1... The first requires being able to overwrite binaries in the Swift tool directory. Yes, if you overwrite binaries executed by ghidra, you can trigger code execution. This is not a surprise. The second, idk, I'm not familiar with TraceRMI (but it's probably worth noting that "RMI"…

I'm no expert on any of these programs, but that's kinda the problem, isn't it? No single person is an expert on every codebase supposedly exploited in this repo. After a bit of research, the Firefox one seems plausible to me. But, I haven't actually tried the POC. The explanation about the private-data and untrusted-input flags is plausible but I'm not an expert on Firefox's internals, maybe that's not actually how…

> Nobody benefits from this

Disclosures always enable more secure software to theoretically exist,

even if nobody follows through creating it.

They often do.

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