>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.
