DataBreaches also invited Sean Banayan to provide a statement for publication. He replied promptly to this site’s email: "We will further investigate this matter internally and do not wish to entertain this matter with your website."
He really missed all the lessons in both manners, common sense and media training.
To be fair, security through denial, lies and intimidation is the industry standard.
Leaving the passwords in clear text is double plus ungood. But my employer recently bought another outfit that does just that, and fixing it is not a near term option. So I'm stuck managing that and three of my fingers are pointing back to me.
Technically speaking if there's nothing to break, it is unbreakable right? Also if you change the law about some crime, you don't have a crime anymore...
It requires programming in a language specific to one little known db product, in an extremely brittle and spaghettified code base . There's exactly one person in the company who kinda knows how to do it, and they're unavailable for the foreseeable future on higher priorities. We don't have the money to throw at new hires or huge porting projects.
Imagine software that has been in production since the 80's, was written by a very inexperienced dev and has since been continually "organically" upgraded to handle any new promise that a nontechnical product manager feels is necessary to solve the immediate problem of an angry customer. It's a Jenga tower with a reset button.
If you know the secret to getting a company to prioritize potential security problems that haven't yet emerged in forty years over meeting payroll, please share.
My paycheck depends on reconciling myself to it. Should I quit possibly my last job before retirement in a bleak job market to protest my manager's decision to protect her job and mine by putting revenue before protecting jane@doe.com's login from being stolen for the Nth time? Am I the bad guy?
It's not my place to define your ethics for you. I'm pointing out so any other readers can be innoculated from accidentally stumbling into this ethical minefield.
I'm not telling you stealing bread so your family doesn't starve is unethical, I'm pointing out it's stealing.
No idea if you're the bad guy, but you're not the ~~good guy~~ hero, no.
I'm a participant in sub-criminal negligence rather than stealing. I'd call that a lesser offense. And it's a failure I have mitigated by working to protect the data. I can't claim innocence, but I sleep OK.
It's also not about bread, because that was just an analogy.
I would sleep ok too, until something bad happened and people I had a responsibility to protect got hurt. Then I wouldn't sleep so well... Turns out humans are really bad at risk calculations.
Possibly, but that's a very different scenario to a database of cleartext passwords (which is what I assumed was meant), as each device would have to be identified and compromised to access a password to a device which at that point is already compromised...
The tone of the article is unprofessional to say the least. You could remove the argumentative tone, vitriol, and insults and have a more impactful article that reflected well on the author while appropriately warning people against this company. Please, don't choose team troll.
Personally, I find the tone of the article appropriate for the response received. The first email clearly set the tone as cordial and friendly while still being urgent. The response was in a clearly adversarial tone. So the prompter adjusted their tone accordingly.
It wasn't necessary to match tones with the person whom wanted to be uncharitable, but it definitely feels more human to me, which is who the writing is for: humans. I would have been fine with an info dump, but I enjoy turnabout as much as any other fan of fair play.
If you want all the clicks and comments and drama you can get, staying professional is just boring.
Professionalism minimizes the risk of derailing or devaluing your argument by you being rude, inappropriate, etc. and avoids aggravating your counterparty. If - as in this case - the goal is NOT Internet drama but rather an improvement in security - the best way to do that would be to remain professional.
It is a question for the author of the piece which angle they prefer - consider that keeping it cool calm and collected is the slow way to build an audience.. even if the audience it builds is more engaged.
While there's a large audience for Jerry Springer style content, verbal abuse and stooping to the level of someone you're criticizing are not required. I don't read HN for name calling or childish taunting. It is always dispiriting to read, and even more so to read people defending. Humans, as you note, have base instincts, but giving into them and catering to them should be left to X and other sites devoted to pandering.
The author is not acting in a professional role here.
He, in his own time, discovered a pretty serious exposure of information and politely informed them. They decided to not be polite in return. He responded in the same tone as them.
There was never any professional obligation, nor any obligation for the author to inform them of their breach at all, nor was there any obligation to give them time to notify clients before publication. Those are all courtesies.
This man didn't choose team troll, he responded to team troll in kind.
To double down here, the author did the correct thing by using their snarkiness.
If someone who in theory is a professional (the company that left all of this in the open) responds in an unprofessional way from the start - you are done using professional tone. That tool isn't producing results. Stop using that tool.
The goal is not to model perfect manners - it is to bring attention to a breach so it can be remedied. The author understands this and has acted so to achieve this result.
I was also ready to chalk this up to "Yet another security researcher needs to learn how to play well with others..." but the moronic and indigent response from "Sean" makes it clear who's wrong here.
Imagine an alternate universe where "Sean" wasn't so aggressively stupid, and instead replied: "Thanks, JayeLTee, we took the database down while we do an audit. We don't think there were any access, and we would rather you not go public about the findings, but it will take us time to check. Please hold off on your publication until [DATE] and we will be in touch."
There. That didn't take much effort! But, no, "Sean" chose belligerence and threats rather than professionalism. I don't know what is wrong with people who just seem to default to "bad attitude" in their communications.
The company did reach out and said something similar, I held my publication for months months waiting for a reply which they said they would send and ended up finding out their were filing breach notifications to multiple states and never said anything back to me.
Not a journalist or a reporter, posts aren't meant to be professional. The only reason I even write any of my posts is because companies DO NOT disclose incidents at all, so I have to do it for them.
I thoroughly enjoyed the post and thought your tone was appropriate, entertaining, and kind of kethartic. You didn't call them names, engage in ad hominem, or do anything click-batey. You were understandably irritated at how they talked to you and how they were clearly trying to hide a massive exposure from their users. And then you shredded them with data.
A+ - And thanks for trying to keep folks like this honest!
Concur. Tone comes off as "toxic manboy". Not sure why the author chose that tone. I would not hire them for their security services just yet, no matter how big a genius they are. Maybe once they understand the world is made of people, not rational actors.
I see this kind of take every time someone exposes incompetence. I get it - you'd rather hire a marketing person to use buzzwords than someone like OP. That's your prerogative.
Hardly. There are simply two ways to expose incompetence. You can be nice or you can be a prick. Your choice. Seeing your handle, you may find it interesting to note that my master's degree in CS was completed at the Technion. I am not looking for marketing people or buzzwords. I am looking for people mature enough to handle other people and get the job done. For example, if you tasked a security boy genius with pushing a fix and all they ended up doing was alienating the dev team, then you are scoring an own goal. I want bright AND mature. I am picky that way.
The author is more professional than the sean was, and conveys the correct amount of disgust we should all hold for this company and it's leadership.
The point of the essay was to be disrespectful of the CEO. Slightly less disrespectful than the CEO was, so IMO he still holds onto the high ground of ethics.
Please do choose team troll. The correct response to someone being a shitter, is not always to kill them with kindness. A lot of the time it is, but this time, I'm clearly on the authors side. He tried twice to be kind, was ignored and then insulted. When really he was owed a thank you, not to be disrespected.
Even in a professional setting, you are not obligated to coddle aggressive stupidity. That's how we end up in a world where nobody says what they mean, everything is just BS on top of BS, and nothing improves. Being direct, being honest, and being accurate are critically important in professional technical work, and while it's not necessary to be antagonistic, it is completely reasonable and socially acceptable to respond in kind to the energy you get. People who are aggressively stupid do not get a pass.
The tone doesn't have to be professional. Not everybody owes you professional courtesy, especially when you're giving away personal information on your customers.
I can see how the CEO would consider the initial email to be a scam, sales pitch, or blackmail (still not entirely sure it doesn't qualify as the last two). I'm sure there have been plenty of emails that qualify as such disclaiming themselves so. Of course, I wouldn't have responded how he did; he needed to tread carefully here when he followed up to learn there was an actual breach, but I totally get why he responded that way. Maybe in the future when making initial contact, instead of telling them only that you aren't scamming them or selling something, tell them what you DO want, or at least tell them you will follow up, just let them know how this goes. That would probably make the medicine go down a bit easier when you follow up later.
Ultimately, when you did air out their laundry after they responded poorly, it did kind of feel like you were blackmailing them.
I told him everything he needed to know to fix the exposure on my initial contact on the exact same email I tell him I'm not asking for anything. I even told him some information about the exposed tables.
Backed by the fact that 1 hour after my email, the exposure was closed and the company never replied back to me, it was only after I followed up they emailed all those claims.
Again, I never asked for anything, I even offered to delay my publication so they could notify people if that was their intent, where is the blackmail here?
>If you don't want money and it's not a scam, why are you emailing them?
It may be shocking to you, but some security researchers notify companies when they are exposing data of their customers. That's it! Simple.
When I notice that thousands of people's personal information is available, I also will email the company and let them know that they are exposing the information of their customers. I don't want money in return. My hobby is security, my payment is knowing that I helped thousands of people out.
>I would NOT be happy to receive such an email.
You would rather just continue to expose your customer's information? Interesting... I don't think you have the ethical high ground here, if that is your position.
While it's hard to convey "this is 100% not a scam" without sounding suspicious, in the example of this article they tried to get it across at the very start. It's on the CEO for becoming hostile to someone who asked for nothing in return and wasn't making any threat.
> First of all, please do not ignore this email, this is not a scam attempt nor am I trying to sell anything, I am just alerting and looking for help closing down a security issue […]
I can't tell if people are being deliberately dense as a way of punishing me for having a critical opinion, not reading the rest of the comments before responding to me, or genuinely do not understand what I am getting at.
A hallmark of a nefarious email (particularly scams but some sales attempts) is that they aim to deceive you. Humans famously have the capability of lying. Someone telling me they are _not_ selling something or scamming me doesn't actually tell me what they want, and it does not provide me with enough information to know that they are not, in fact, scamming me. It just lets me know they don't want me to think I am being scammed.
>A hallmark of a nefarious email (particularly scams but some sales attempts) is that they aim to deceive you.
The very first email has literally everything the company needs to locate and fix the issue without having to sign anything, log into anything, or pay anything.
That is the opposite of a nefarious email.
Nefarious "beg bounty" emails will tell you that you have an issue and then not tell you where it is -- asking for money before revealing the issue.
FWIW, I get several of these emails per week, as the first-reader of security@ emails, and they're almost always scams, sales pitches, or poorly-disguised bounty sniffers.
I can't even count the number of times I've been informed that Wordpress.com (.com, not self-hosted) has severe vulnerabilities. And those are the plausible reports.
But I always respond professionally and with civility, obviously, because if they have useful information for me, I want to hear it.
In defense of the researcher: Their message was better than most, and explained the issue found directly instead of couching it in BS claims. That's good.
In criticism of the researcher: They should have linked to their website where they publish reports, and been more plain about their modus operandi from the outset. Let the company know exactly who they're dealing with, and what to expect. Stating it in a sentence is "good", but linking to the evidence is much more credible.
I've been on both sides of this relationship. My dumbest experience was with a large bank (HQ in the Netherlands, but operating in several countries including the US and AU, and now acquired by a US bank). I reported a total account compromise vulnerability which would affect 12.5% of their users. I thought my email would be well-received and the (very simple and externally-obvious) issue quickly resolved. Instead I got threats and hostility from some SVP IS nitwit. I told him to go pound sand obviously, and it took them a week to fix the problem. My SO was a customer (which is the only reason I noticed the issue), but not for long. :)
Agreed that the wording to fully understand my intent might not be present on the email and is only achieved when you look at the whole email and what information I provide etc, I've been trying different things to see what works as unfortunately I get ignored totally, A LOT.
That is also the reason there is no direct link to my publications on the actual emails, another link to add suspicion of phishing that leads to being ignored.
I do provide a link to my index with all my public finds on the signature of the email though.
Also a google search of my handle which I sign and mention on the email would get multiple hits for reputable news websites such as Databreaches.net, TechCrunch, The Register, Publimetro, but doesn't seem companies do much vetting at all before ignoring the alerts.
I think your blog post was a bit juvenile. Amusing maybe, but you're a professional and there's no need to resort to name-calling. Let the toddler's behaviour speak for itself. You don't need to laugh at them in public. It's fun though, I get it. Just gratuitous.
My recommendation to you, to turn your email report from "good" to "great", would be something like this:
------------
> Hi, I'm an independent security researcher and I publish my findings under the name "Yyyy". My primary website is yyyy.com and I've had reports published in Blah, Blah, and Blah. A quick web search will tell you more about me and my background.
> I'm writing to report an issue I noticed in toddlerceo.com. Specifically:
> (your good and complete list of specifics here, including exposure risk and high level mitigation notes if practical).
> My intent is to improve the security of the Internet, and to write about the kinds of issues I've discovered. The issue I've described here will make for an interesting and valuable article, but I don't want to publish until you've had a chance to fix the issue, so my standard procedure is to delay publication for 30 days. I'll work on the article now, and schedule it for publication on March 24th, 2025.
> Please let me know if you need any more details on the issue I've found.
----------
This may be more than they deserve! But that's OK, because you're a professional and if you are lucky enough to get a professional on the other side of the conversation, you will earn their respect, at no cost to you.
And let's be honest: your motivation for writing this article is self-promotional. You want work. Impress the CEO/security officer/etc, and you will get work, or referrals for work. So it may be more than they deserve, but it works in your interests too.
>They should have linked to their website where they publish reports, and been more plain about their intentions from the outset.
I don't get this. Their intentions should be clear by the fact that they reveal the entirety of the issue (what's wrong, why it's wrong, where to find it) in the first email. They don't ask for money, hide information behind further correspondence, or anything else that would raise suspicion.
The company has everything they need to locate, verify, and fix the issue without having to ever interact with the security researcher again. That's about as obviously well-intentioned as you can get.
But as the reader of lots of these emails, I'm always happier to hear from someone who is able to establish their credibility and intentions with public evidence from the beginning of the conversation.
I'd like to know that I'm dealing with a professional, who takes their work seriously. And I'd like to know if I'm going to be dealing with fallout from next month's feature article as a matter of course, or if I'm being extorted to avoid publishing. (This is a thing).
>I'd like to know that I'm dealing with a professional, who takes their work seriously
As a sender of these emails, my credibility is established when you go to the location I say there's sensitive data being leaked, and you find sensitive data being leaked. Nothing else should matter.
Are you just going to keep data exposed publicly if, for example, some curious kid notified you instead of a professional?
Hostility to good-faith security research, as shown in the OPs article and in some of the comments here (not specifically you), makes everyone worse off.
Having myself received hostility, demands to prove my credibility, and legal threats when sending notifications like OPs, in most cases now I don't bother to notify anyone. Instead, the data just sits there, accessible to the actual bad guys. Hurray!
No, your "correctness" is established. The credibility of your report is established.
But your credibility as a professional non-extortionist is absolutely still in question, unfortunately.
Again, I've been on both sides. Being the only professional in the room is sometimes the way things work out. But that's OK, because you can walk away from the conversation still being the professional, and they cannot. This pays dividends.
I've run across people years later who apologized for being a jerk in our previous exchange. They were under pressure, didn't fully understand, felt insecure, blah blah whatever who cares. But they realized their error and got smarter for it. And I gained their respect. That doesn't work if you don't stay professional.
If I'm asked to be more professional or to prove my credibility to someone leaking the data of their customers, I just laugh. I owe nothing to the company being negligent. A notification email with all the pertinent details is what you get.
If a company isn't going to act on it after confirming my "correctness" just because they want me to show them my diploma and resume, that says a lot more about the company than it does me.
But don't fret, as I said the number of companies that forced me to jump through hoops to report a security issue, or threatened me after reporting one, has made it so I don't often bother anymore. Hopefully someone with a more professional tone emails instead, before the data gets sucked up by Lazarus Group or whoever.
Of course you don't owe them anything. And the disclosure is a gift, unless you also use it for self-promotion, which is the usual compensation model aside from bounty programs.
But if you want to improve the ratio of reasonable-to-hostile responses, it's worth spending an extra couple minutes composing your presentation in the most digestible way. Also it's good for business.
If you're serious about helping to improve the net, or being a good netizen, you'll understand that recipients come in all shapes, and you have the best chance of achieving your goals if you make a small extra effort.
If you're at all worried that your report will evoke a hostile response, you always have the option of reporting it anonymously. I've done this, and it does work (vulnerability gets fixed).
Or if you just want to laugh at the colossal morons who don't take you as seriously as you believe you deserve, then sure whatever.
Your motivations are clear to you, the person drafting the email. If they were clear to the CEO, he likely would not have responded the way he did. Look, I understand that you reached out with the best of intentions and that my criticism is not welcome, mainly because of that. What you are doing is important. I just think if you added a bit more info to your initial email about what you want, things could have gone differently.
Motivations are stated after I explain why I'm emailing.
"I'm an independent researcher who posts under the name JayeLTee. I look for publicly exposed data online on my free time and alert the companies affected to try and close the exposure."
There is nothing more than that, want me to make a fairy tale story to tell the companies? I try to be as clear as possible and pass the message as clean as possible with no BS on the email, again because I'm not selling a product or a service.
Yes, I did read this line in your email. Possibly the CEO didn't after his trusted rockstar team told him the issue was fixed and that they were un-hackable. Look, I think you could change up your initial email slightly to reach a higher probability of positive interactions. You are welcome to disregard my opinion.
I hope you are not in a client-facing role, as you appear to lack the ability to understand another's perspective. Security researchers rely on publications and recognition from security platforms to build their CVs. That's what he wanted. Think about it that way if everyone was a n idiot like the CEO of this ordeal we would have way less white hats.
I am in a very client facing role, and my clients quite like me. You know nothing about me, and you are completely misunderstanding this situation. I am holding the researcher accountable to how they comported themselves in this interaction instead of dick-riding a fellow hacker I actually do understand what security researchers usually want out of such an interaction. Where things fall apart is that the CEO does _not_ know, then the researcher punished them for their behavior and accessed their data, likely illegally. I am trying to communicate why they got a bad response, and why their response to the bad response was bad. I probably shouldn't have mentioned blackmail because people are focusing on that. I'm mainly trying to say "it reads like it could be blackmail" and they'd have a friendlier interaction with just a little more info upfront.
He is absolutely in his right to write a post about it. He even tried to mediate with a third party. You are delusional if you think somebody owes you something in that situation.
> I'm simply trying to say the researcher would have more pleasant interactions with the people they email if they helped the person understand what they _do_ want out of the interaction instead of just saying they aren't being scammed. If the researcher placed themselves in the shoes of the CEO, they could understand why the CEO responded that way. That's not the same thing as thinking the CEO _should_ have responded that way. I am also not letting the researcher off the hook for responding to the CEOs response the way they did.
You are right if you just look at the emails you are disregarding the attempt to mediate via a reputable third party. In which the ceo reacted in the same way.
As I read it, he wants them to secure their systems and fulfill their legal and ethical obligations to their customers and regulators by notifying them of the breach.
I'm not sure what you find ambiguous or confusing.
The breach that he actually did. They should fulfill their obligations under the law, and they should file a report with their national law enforcement agency with information about the person who is claiming to have done the crime in question.
Blackmail is when someone says "do $thing or else". That didn't happen here, implicitly or explicitly.
If you're saying the implicit blackmail was "don't be an asshole, or else I'll be unkind when I talk about you later to others", then all of us are always blackmailing one another with every conversation.
Yes, "it would be a shame if something were to happen" is also not extortion, because you aren't actually saying you will visit misery upon them, only implying it. The mistake you are making is assuming the researcher wants literally nothing, or that the CEO can know they want literally nothing. I still have no idea what they actually wanted, and whether there was going to be some sort of value extraction.
I see you read and understood the researcher's emails as well as the CEO did, then...I'm not assuming anything, I'm repeating what was said.
Are you suggesting that lacking understanding of something someone says, one's first reaction should be an asshole to that person, just in case they are trying to sell something?
No, I'm simply trying to say the researcher would have more pleasant interactions with the people they email if they helped the person understand what they _do_ want out of the interaction instead of just saying they aren't being scammed. If the researcher placed themselves in the shoes of the CEO, they could understand why the CEO responded that way. That's not the same thing as thinking the CEO _should_ have responded that way. I am also not letting the researcher off the hook for responding to the CEOs response the way they did.
The author did just that, though. They said they wanted to write up a post about the incident.
I think both I and the author understand why the CEO responded as they did; it's because the CEO doesn't care about security, and when a security issue was raised, they viewed the reporter as a threat to the blanket of lies they wanted to use to brush the whole thing under the rug.
In light of that, I think the author's response was appropriate. A lesser response would be letting the company off the hook.
The CEO's reasons for not liking the situation are quite obvious, yes, they were caught with their pants down, it makes them look bad (the company was bad). I'm not advocating for letting them off the hook, I'm advocating for better communication. That's pretty much it.
New Zealander here, really thrilled to see our national medical testing service (primarily blood tests) in here. I've sent a note to them to make sure they're aware of this.
Also I feel like I took the wrong path, trying to be a serious and responsible software developer - seems like all the money is in throwing shit together and making wild claims about it.
Step 6 happened because the CEO in his hubris, decided it would be in his best interests to threaten someone instead of being greatful.
Additionally, had the CEO responded appropriately and followed the standard methodology of all reasonable bug bounty programs, it would have included a request for the researcher to verify the fix and that there are no additional related bugs or defects with the current patch.
You noticed that the email implies the security has been perfected. Did you also note that it would be unethical for a professional to blindly convey that false belief.
I'm wondering how it's possible that step 6 happened, not what the motivations are. It's written in multiple places as if database queries were issued after the database was taken down.
I think the data he discloses in the post is the one that he got before getting in contact with the company. He does this in order to prove that the database was accesible to anyone on the internet, instead of the "no breach at all" claimed on the response email.
He writes as if he has access to large quantities of data after the CEO responded to him, which implies that it was after the exposed database was fixed, as the author acknowledges in the email he sent to the CEO.
No I did not query the database after it was exposed.
The information I had was from when the database was publicly exposed.
I don't want to be too specific about the links for the files as I don't know if others accessed this information and could exploit it but they had the website path to download the files exposed on the database, you just needed to know what to add to it, I tried a few things from the information I had and found out they worked.
I would of probably skipped over this, but after their response I wondered if there was more to it.
The files were not stored on the database, they were on a cloud storage but that link made it so no authentication was required to access them (not an expert but would say some hard coded access keys or something similar).
To which the CEO was rude and dismissive and threatening. Which is often a sign of having something to hide. I assume the author decided to then verify if the threats were made from a position of strength or weakness.
I read his email as a polite gesture, giving them a chance to request more time. I'm still confused as to what parts you're missing. Are you trying to imply something, or do you really not understand that people can lie and withhold information?
> The email was read by someone, I assume the CEO, and less than an hour after it was sent, I could not connect to the exposed server anymore.
This was after the author’s first email, and before the CEOs reply.
What tptacek was getting at is that the article is a bit unclear on when the review of DB contents occurred, since the author no longer had access. (But I think it’s just because the author reviewed the contents already before they reported the issue.)
Oh dear, that really is a poor response by the CEO. Can't wait to see the grovelling apology he comes up with when NZ media/regulator comes asking questions
It looks like the CEO is both clueless and his reports are also probably misleading him. Whoever looked into the security problem probably saw the extent of it. This possibly got downplayed when reported back to the CEO. However rude, the CEO had little reason to lie about the extent of the problem towards the security researcher.
I imagine the conversation between the CEO and his reports included something about "it's no biggie, the passwords were hashed using bcrypt, that's like irreversible encryption" without contextualizing that and mentioning that plaintext auth tokens were also exposed.
I think it was downplayed even more. Supposedly the initial email by the researcher only had evidence for leaking database sizes, and I think it's likely that the CEO only got confirmation for this evidence internally and nothing more.
"This server contains over 3,8GB of data exposed including the logins for 16,500 of your users and a lot of PII and credentials, you need to secure access to the server as soon as possible."
After all that transpired after etc I believe it's possible someone downplayed the severity of this to the CEO and he took that as an opportunity to ignore everything I wrote on the emails and reply that way to me assuming I was some cybersecurity vendor working for "Proton" trying to push something for the company to buy.
CEO felt a threat to his company and responded accordingly. He is clearly green and impolite. Sending a vulnerability disclosure to someone without knowing their experience, and given the amount of spam on the web, one should not be surprised at the response. Trying to do a good thing and getting scolded for it feels terrible, though. One might understand why the researcher would put up database details for the world to see and fail to realize it is petty to do so. I hope both gentlemen learned their lesson.
Unfortunately, there are people out there (with a seemingly large overlap with CEOs) that have incredibly fragile egos, and any perceived criticism (such as pointing out a dreadful security failure) can result in lies, excessive reactions, defensiveness, denial, insults, scapegoating or even retaliation. Or all of the above.
In situations like this, it feels to me like the reaction is “how dare you think that I would need your help?!”
Once again, one of my rules of thumb holds true: if someone is claiming that their security is "impossible to hack", they're either massively incompetent or they're trying to sell you some BS.
Usually like reading such posts but the author’s approach did seem very blackmail-like.
The CEO is surely coming off as a crazy guy but the author isn’t a white knight or good Samaritan either.
The company closed the database access and the guy says “now I will disclose it or you can do X”
Would he have not disclosed it if they offered hush money? We won’t know, for his case I hope not. In any case - what was he expecting?
I’d imagine there is 50%+ chance that any smaller company without a dedicated security team will take this disclosure as a threat and blackmail. Especially that on the first second and third thought it seems the disclosure would be a way for the author to boost their blog and content marketing for their consulting.
If there was a bug bounty or something on their site it would have been different.
> Would he have not disclosed it if they offered hush money? We won’t know, for his case I hope not. In any case - what was he expecting?
A bog-standard responsible disclosure that any tech CEO should either be familiar with or have someone at hand that is, as is clearly communicated in that e-mail.
Both e-mails are OP reaching out to help this company out, the first fixing the vulnerability, the second giving them a chance for compliance / potential regulatory aspects they might want to follow. It's not on random people reporting security vulnerabilities to tutor random companies on this and both behaviors (non-responsiveness, then hostility) of this CEO, despite being sadly common, are actively harmful if you want to get productive security reports in the future. (And the company unilaterally signing up for bug bounty programs is rather irrelevant for independent researchers as well if they have no interest in participating in those.)
I don't think you get to call yourself polite or well-meaning when you pan them and air their shit out publicly after they respond in a way you don't like. Maybe you were superficially polite, but you do not come across as an angel. I _still_ don't know exactly what your goals are, if you're looking for acknowledgement, payment, or just trying to make the Internet a safer place for users.
I think the around 50 public disclosures I did in the last year where I asked 0 times for anything kinda show I'm not looking for any payments.
There is a huge issue regarding publicly exposed data that no one seems to want to acknowledge or talk about, what you see online? It's 100 times worse.
I'm someone who is trying to raise awareness through my finds, nothing else.
Also I was initially polite to the company, not once but twice, as I am to anyone who I reach out, why wouldn't I be? I want them to fix the issues, not ignore me.
Don't expect the politeness to be infinite though, specially when you start accusing me of harassment and lying about the severity of the exposure that affects thousands of people, the ones I DO care about, not the companies.
Sure you do. The poster was polite, got an extremely rude response, and has no obligation to be polite afterwards.
Airing their shit out is a disclosure of a vulnerability, and it's important to do. Typically you reach out to say, "how would you prefer I do this?" And work through a common understanding. The company flipped the bird, so it got aired very publicly.
I can call myself a bicycle but I don't have any wheels.
Their behavior when things don't go their way belies their initial "politeness". When the transaction didn't go how they wanted, they pulled the trigger on being a dick, publicly. That is a much worse offense that an impolite email. If this were a coworker or a contractor, it would color all of my interactions with them going forward.
> they pulled the trigger on being a dick, publicly. That is a much worse offense that an impolite email.
brain dead take; the article was impolite, the email was an overt threat by an impotent exec *in response to someone trying to help*!
Dang it bobby, it's not worse to respond to respond to asshattery (the email) with irreverent sunlight (the article).
I also wouldn't call you a bicycle because you're not going anywhere with this attitude. The CEO got a gift, and the author got a middle finger. No matter what happens after, the CEO without a doubt shot first. And shot someone just trying to help. He can get fucked, and anyone defending him can join in too.
I'm not defending him so much as advocating for understanding, grace, transparency, and de-escalation. You of course are welcome to conduct yourself in the ways that you see fit.
Nah, it's clear to me that you're defending the CEO, and blaming the researcher. In a manner that's as you state is just my opinion, is inverse from what justice would be.
Wild how I can state my intentions and then someone would just not believe me.
But seriously, it's not possible for me to frame how the researcher could improve future probability of success without framing it from the CEOs perspective. To do that I must recognize he is a human person with his own internal motivations for his behaviors, which likely are not so much monstrous as childish.
Your other comments across the larger topic refute your claimed good intentions. It's not that wild that no one would believe you, when you contradict yourself.
My thoughts on the matter may have evolved over time while interacting with other people in the thread. While I do still believe it could have been an attempt at blackmail, I think it most likely was not, even though the researcher clearly must have downloaded the entire database ahead of time based on the chronology presented. In that case, I can see how I have apparently contradicted myself. But I can assure you, I am not acting in bad faith.
I never thought you were acting in bad faith. My assumption was that you were gaslit like every other non-security person has been, where you were willing to shoot the messenger (the researcher) instead of the person creating the problem (the CEO). My problem wasn't that you were lied to, my only problem was that you were repeating a common lie that I think needs to die.
People operating in bad faith give up or hide when they notice their position is weakening, people working in good faith respond, and acknowledge the weaknesses in their ideas. Like you are doing.
Agree. "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole!" Best case scenario, CEO just got an annoying distraction that was a credible enough threat they had to waste time investigating. Worst case they had a breach and someone is extorting or hacking them. Some grace on the part of the researcher is warranted IMO, despite the amateur handling by the CEO. No one looks good here.
The OP/researcher looks fine. They tried twice to help someone who would eventually prove they didn't deserve they help. They then, after being disrespected, still upheld all the ethical requirements from a security researcher, redacting sensitive information. The CEO looks like a twat waffle, but the researcher is clean, and just looks like someone intolerant of overt disrespect. Being willing to stand up to bullies is admirable, not disheartening.
I don't know how you could see the CEO as a bully in this situation. The researcher clearly has "power" in this situation over the CEO, he pretty much has caught him with his pants down, so in this case the CEO is lashing out at a perceived threat. You are entitled to the opinion that the researcher responded proportionately in this situation, I happen to disagree. I would not want my friends or coworkers responding this way in their daily dealings, I would want to give someone a chance to make amends instead of escalating, because this is not a playground and the stakes for the CEO are very real and potentially very damaging.
I hope maybe we can agree, though, that with a few simple modifications to his approach, he is likely to reduce the probability of negative responses to the initial email. For example, he seems to already understand that people will take this email as a scam or sales attempt. But much is left to the imagination of the (uninformed) recipient about what the auth truly _does_ want. By filling in those blanks, the imagination need not be active.
> I don't know how you could see the CEO as a bully in this situation.
someone tried to help him, he responded by making threats, and being rude. This is bully behavior. Why do you think responding to either email with a direct threat is reasonable?
> The researcher clearly has "power" in this situation over the CEO
You don't work in, or around information security do you? You're the first person to ever make any claim remotely close to saying any "researcher" has any kind of power. Without the context, if I told any of my security friends about researchers having power, I'd get a laugh about how absurd that idea is.
> he pretty much has caught him with his pants down, so in this case the CEO is lashing out at a perceived threat. You are entitled to the opinion that the researcher responded proportionately in this situation, I happen to disagree. I would not want my friends or coworkers responding this way in their daily dealings,
Much stronger than the expectations I have for security researchers, I wouldn't want my CEO to respond to them like a petty twat. Because when you piss off a researcher, just like the cyclist and the car. We can *both* lose https://gr.ht/i/both-lose.png
> I would want to give someone a chance to make amends instead of escalating, because this is not a playground and the stakes for the CEO are very real and potentially very damaging.
yeah, couldn't agree more... maybe you should raise your expectations for the CEO who's paid not to be a POS, and actually has a duty to protect users, instead of the random trying to stop bad things happening to people he doesn't know?
> I hope maybe we can agree, though, that with a few simple modifications to his approach, he is likely to reduce the probability of negative responses to the initial email. For example, he seems to already understand that people will take this email as a scam or sales attempt. But much is left to the imagination of the (uninformed) recipient about what the auth truly _does_ want. By filling in those blanks, the imagination need not be active.
It's not his responsibility to do any of that, that's the CEOs. Across all your replies, you defend the CEO like he's your brother. Hold *THEM* to the higher standard.
> someone tried to help him, he responded by making threats
My whole point is that he doesn't actually know what the researcher wants, saw it as a threat, and responded to it as if it were a threat.
> You're the first person to ever make any claim remotely close to saying any "researcher" has any kind of power.
Having the entirety of their application database including customer PII, possibly the capability to encrypt the database and extort the company with it, not to mention the possibility of other potentially undisclosed vulnerabilities, decidedly IS significant power over a company. That's how bad actors are able to use any combination of these things to make money.
> Much stronger than the expectations I have for security researchers, I wouldn't want my CEO to respond to them like a petty twat.
I agree whole-heartedly. As for the rest, we more or less agree, you just are putting the onus on the CEO. I also expect more out of a CEO. I just don't think that feedback is actually particularly constructive to the audience here at HN.
> I also expect more out of a CEO. I just don't think that feedback is actually particularly constructive.
Your attempts to put any onus on the researcher are actively harmful. No one should point finger at the researchers trying to help. We should all point fingers at the primary person who's able to prevent bad things happening. You haven't once attempted to put any responsibility on the CEO. This is the first time. You asked in another reply if everyone else is being dense; but you're the one blaming the researcher, did you stop to consider if everyone disagrees with you, that maybe you're the problem?
edit:
> My whole point is that he doesn't actually know what the researcher wants, saw it as a threat, and responded to it as if it were a threat.
Yeah, and doing that was gross negligence. There's a reason you're not allowed waive harms arising from gross negligence.
The CEO is not here, and will never, ever be here, so criticism of him is not constructive, further the author already criticized him and so do many comments here. It is plain to see he acted like an idiot, and no one thinks he is the hero here. That's why it's not constructive. Maybe my response is actively harmful, I don't know, that's not what I'm after, of course.
Even if a guy is an easily hackable asshole, usually accessing the stuff directly and downloading his database is still a crime (at least in the US), stay safe buddy.
If I serve a file with info I didn't intend for the world to see at example.com/secret and you access it, did you commit a crime? Clearly no.
Given that, you have no way to even know if the data which was available publicly contained any private information. This guy is doing a fine public service, and any company he helps should pay him for saving their asses.
DataBreaches also invited Sean Banayan to provide a statement for publication. He replied promptly to this site’s email: "We will further investigate this matter internally and do not wish to entertain this matter with your website."
He really missed all the lessons in both manners, common sense and media training.
reply