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I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

dixken.de

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Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

#161

Post by knollimar »

henryfjordan wrote: post #132
psadauskas wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding your 2), in other industries and engineering professions, the architect (or civil engineer, or electrical engineer) who signed off carries insurance, and often is licensed by the state. I absolutely do not want to gatekeep beginners from being able to publish their work on the open internet, but I often wonder if we should require some sort of certification and insurance for large businesses sites that hand…

It's kinda wild that you don't need to be a professional engineer to store PII. The GDPR and other frameworks for PII usually do have a minimum size (in # of users) before they apply, which would help hobbyists. The same could apply for the licensure requirement. But also maybe hobbyists don't have any business storing PII at scale just like they have no business building public bridges or commercial aircraft.

I'm wary of centralizing the powers of the web like that.

Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

#162

Post by lucb1e »

kube-system wrote: post #146

I suspect that the direction of these situations often depends on how your initial email is routed internally in these organizations. If they go to a lawyer first, you will get someone who tries to fix things with the application of the law. If it goes to an engineer first, you will get someone who tries to fix it with an application of engineering. If it were me, I would have avoided involving third party regulators…

Yes, this routing is common. German energy company recommended by a climate organization had a somewhat similar vulnerability and no security contact, so I call them up and.. mhm, yes, okay, is that l-e-g-a-l-@-company-dot-de? You don't want me to just send it to the IT department that can fix it? Okay I see, they will put it through, yes, thank you, bye for now!

Was a bit of a "oh god what am I getting into again" moment (also considering I don't speak legal-level German), but I knew they had nothing to stand on if they did file a complaint or court case so I followed through and they just thanked me for the report in the end and fixed it reasonably promptly. No stickers or maybe a discount as a customer, but oh well, no lawsuit either :)

Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

#163

Post by xvxvx »

dspillett wrote: post #93
xvxvx wrote: post #2

I’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…

> I came across a pretty serious security concern at my company this week. The ramifications are alarming. […] Then when I bring it to leadership, their agenda is to take these conversations offline, with no paper trail, and kill the conversation. I was in a very similar position some years ago. After a couple of rounds of “finish X for sale Y then we'll prioritise those issue”, which I was young and scared enough to…

An older company I worked for went out of their way to find a pen tester that would basically rubberstamp everything and give them a pass. I actually uncovered major issues with the software during that process, to the point where it was unusable. Major components were severely out of date and open to attack. Other parts didn't even work as advertised. I didn't stick around much longer.

Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

#164

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

Contacting the authorities led the company to hire lawyers— for communication with the data protection authority.

The lever lawyers have to “make it go away” is “law says so.” They’re not going to beg for mercy, they’re not going to invite you to coffee, no “bug bounty.” From their perspective if they arm-wrestle the researcher into an NDA, they patched the only known breach, retrospectively.

Perhaps it’s not prosocial or best practice, but you can clearly see how this went down from the company perspective, with a subject organization that has a tenuous grasp of cyber security concepts.

Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

#165

Post by lucb1e »

DANmode wrote: post #129
nilslindemann wrote: post #116

AFAIK, what this dude did - running a script which tries every password and actually accessing personal data of other people – is illegal in Germany. The reasoning is, just because a door of a car which is not yours is open you have no right to sit inside and start the motor. Even if you just want to honk the horn to inform the guy that he has left the door open. https://www.nilsbecker.de/rechtliche-grauzonen-fuer-et…

Hopefully no criminals turn up to do the illegal thing.

You don't need to retrieve other people's data to demonstrate the vulnerability.

It's readily evident that people have an account with a default password on the site for some amount of time, and some of them indefinitely. You know what data is in the account (as the person who creates the accounts) and you know the IDs are incremental. You can do the login request and never use the retrieved access/session token (or use a HEAD request to avoid getting body data but still see the 200 OK for the login) if you want to beat the dead horse of "there exist users who don't configure a strong password when not required to". OP evidenced that they went beyond that and saw at least the date of birth of a user on there by saying "I found underage students on your site" in the email to the organization

If laws don't make it illegal to do this kind of thing, how would you differentiate between the white hat and the black hat? The former can choose to do the minimum set of actions necessary to verify and report the weakness, while the latter writes code to dump the whole database. That's a choice

To be fair, not everyone is aware that this line exists. It's common to prove the vulnerability, and this code does that as well. It's also sometimes extra work (set a custom request method, say) to limit what the script retrieves and just not the default kind of code you're used to writing for your study/job. Going too far happens easily in that sense. So the rules are to be taken leniently and the circumstances and subsequent actions of the hacker matter. But I can see why the German the rules are this way, and the Dutch ones are similar for example

Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

#166

Post by anal_reactor »

Unless the company has a bug-bounty program, never ever tell them about vulnerabilities. You'll get ignored at best and have legal issues at worst. Instead, sell them on the black market. Or better yet, just give away for free if you don't care about money. That's how companies will eventually learn to at least have official vulnerability disclosure policy.

Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

#168

Post by lucb1e »

jcynix wrote: post #123
czbond wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree - yet, security researchers and our wider community also needs to recognize that vulnerabilities are foreign to most non-technical users. Cold approach vulnerability reports to non-technical organizations quite frankly scare them. It might be like someone you've never met telling you the door on your back bedroom balcony can be opened with a dummy key, and they know because they tried it. Such organizations don…

> Such organizations don't know what to do. Maybe they should simply use some common sense? If someone could and would steal valuables, it seems highly unlikely that he/she/it would notify you before doing it. If they would want to extort you, they would possibly do so early on. And maybe encrypt some data as a "proof of concept" ... But some organizations seem to think that their lawyers will remedy every failure an…

> If someone could and would steal valuables, it seems highly unlikely that he/she/it would notify you before doing it.

after* doing it. Though I agree with your general point

Note the parts in the email to the organization where OP (1) mentions they found underage students among the unsecured accounts and (2) attaches a script that dumps the database, ready to go¹. It takes very little to see in access logs that they accessed records that they weren't authorized to, which makes it hard to distinguish their actions from malicious ones

I do agree that if the org had done a cursory web search, they'd have found that everything OP did (besides dumping more than one record from the database) is standard practice and that responsible disclosure is an established practice that criminals obviously wouldn't use. That OP subsequently agrees to sign a removal agreement, besides the lack of any extortion, is a further sign of good faith which the org should have taken them up on

¹ though very inefficiently, but the data protection officer that they were in touch with (note: not a lawyer) wouldn't know that and the IT person that advises them might not feel the need to mention it

Re: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

#170

Post by lucb1e »

socketcluster wrote: post #142

I found a vulnerability recently in a major online platform through HackerOne which could allow an attacker to cheaply DoS the service. I wrote up a detailed report (by hand) showing exactly how to reproduce and even explained exactly how a specially crafted request to a critical service took 10 seconds to get a response (just with a very simple, easy to reproduce example)... I then explained exactly how this vector…

This is sort of my issue with bug bounty programs: it can easily start to feel like extortion when a 'good samaritan' demands money. But they promised it to you by having a bug bounty program, then denied it. You feel rightfully cheated when the bug is legitimate, and doubly so when they acknowledge it. But demanding the money feels weird as well.

I try to go into these things with zero expectations. Having a mediating party involved from the start is a bit like OP immediately CC'ing the CERT: extra legal steps in the disclosure process. Mediating parties are usually a pain to work with, and if it's deemed "out of scope" then they typically refuse to even notify the vulnerable party (or acknowledge to you that it hasn't been disclosed). I don't want a pay day, I just want them to fix their damn bug, but there's no way to report it besides through this middle person. Literally every time I've had to use a reporting procedure (like HackerOne) has resulted in tone-deaf responses from the company or complete gatekeeping. All of those bugs exist to this day. Every time I can email a human directly, it gets fixed, and in some occasions they send a thank-you like some swag and chocolates, a t-shirt, something

Based on what I hear in the community, my HackerOne experiences have been outliers, but it might still be more effective (if you're not looking to collect bounty money) to talk to organizations directly where possible and avoid the ones that use HackerOne or another mediation party

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