Hacker News Reader

Comment by gotothrowaway | Hacker News Reader

This isn't all that complicated, as far as I can tell.

Guy discloses a vulnerability. He knows it potentially has wide reaching security concerns, and downloads enough data to prove that if necessary.

Guy gets shortchanged on the bounty, indicating that either a) facebook is trying to shortchange him, or b) facebook doesn't realize how big of a vulnerability this truly is

Everything about Facebook's response indicates b): they didn't realize how big a vulnerability this truly was. Otherwise, the data he downloaded would have been useless by the time he used it.

You can argue that the guy "went rogue" by hostaging information, but fact is he deserved to be paid more and he was able to prove it. Now facebook looks bad.

View on HN

Guy discloses vulnerability. Facebook is not as impressed as guy would have hoped. Maybe it's because he's one of several people to disclose the same vulnerability. Maybe there are just a lot of vulnerabilities (they've paid out 4.3m in bounties).

Guy's reaction to rejection: take hostages and threaten Facebook. Facebook moves to defense and cuts guy off.

You are not a good neighbor for kidnapping someone's family to prove to someone their busted lock is a big deal. You show them their lock is busted and trust they can figure out what harm that could lead to. The alternative is companies being hostile to people just looking around their locks, which is the world in the 1990's and 2000's that responsible researchers are trying to avoid going back to.

This is, of course, Facebook's narrative which conflict's with Wes's.

One obvious hole I can see in Facebook's story is that they insinuate that Wes broke back into the server after they disputed the bounty. If this were true, they did nothing in response to the problems Wes found for over a month.

If you look at Wes's timeline, he says access to the server was no longer possible a few days after he filed the second report.

It comes down to who you believe. Personally, I find Wes to be more credible. It sounds like it was most likely a misunderstanding by FaceBook. Now they are doing damage control.

"With the newly obtained AWS key... I queued up several buckets to download, and went to bed for the night."

He definitely took data off of Facebook's server.

Also you misunderstand his access being denied was a firewall change earlier in his story. This was merely to speculate other systems he could have penetrated--completely separate from the S3 buckets he took data from.

From Facebook's perspective it could very well have seemed like he went back for the goods since he submitted three separate reports, the last of which triggered the response. But this is also irrelevant, the question is whether he took data off or not and this is unambiguously yes, by Wes's own admission.

Honestly, I think he did go too far downloading the S3 data, but nothing in their policy stated or implied that was against the rules. He did not violate their written guidelines. And so, Facebook should have paid him (and then changed their policy), even if begrudgingly.

Here is what's happening right now:

FB: He's an experienced bug bounty hunter and should know where reasonable borders are.

All the experienced security guys itt: He's an experienced bug bounty hunter and should know where reasonable borders are or at least not pivot/escalate without asking. Also never dump and hold data.

Everyone else: What he did isn't technically against the rules FB wrote, so they are screwing him, despite it also being written that they have sole discretion.

> All the experienced security guys itt...

Ah, so those who disagree are inexperienced? No true scottsman indeed!

How is that a "no true scotsman"? Most people in this thread commenting have not indicated they work in the infosec industry.

(For the record, I do, though I'm not sure I'd flatter myself by saying I'm "experienced" exactly.)

The problems I have with your absolute statement:

* You are stating that all (not some) experienced security folks are agreeing unanimously. The implication is that those show disagree are not "experienced security guys" (as you called them: "everyone else") - they are the ones who aren't true scotsman

* you assume those who don't explicitly indicate that they work in infosec industry do not work in the infosec industry

* also, you do you need to be "experienced" in the infosec industry to be correct / wrong.

I wasn't the one who made the comment you're referring to. I'm just saying there is no evidence of a "no true Scotsman" here, as far as I can tell.

apologies - didn't notice you weren't OP. IMO, the "no true Scotsman" is implied (might be unintentional)

The general theme of the thread seems to be security industry people, like tptacek (or commenters self-identifying as being in the industry), expressing concern with the researcher's actions (while still admitting Facebook didn't handle it well). The primarily negative comments don't seem to have a specific affiliation tied to them. And given HN's demographic, odds are much more of them are developers than are infosec people.

I don't think the person you were replying to was suggesting that any infosec people who fully support the researcher aren't real infosec workers. I just don't think he saw any who even claimed to be.

I disagree; this is non customer, non-financial data which is often considered fair game because downloading data is useful to locate many security bugs. Source code or config data is a prime target, but so is network diagrams etc.

Defense in depth means every defense needs to be validated not just the outer layers.

PS: Further, if FB says they know about a bug then anything he downloaded could easily be in the wild and should be investigated.

This. Literally every single person who identified themselves as in the security fields that I saw said the researcher went too far.

What's really getting to me is the overwhelming number of responses containing idea that everything that isn't explicitly banned is permitted, despite the recipient saying "No" (even indirectly/without justification) at some point. How to deal with the grey area of consent is something that every adult should know, and it's worrying to me that so many here seem to feel entitled to whatever they can take as long as it wasn't explicitly forbidden.

Obviously FB should update their policy, but at the same time it's important that we as the community use this as an opportunity to learn and discuss where the implicit boundaries are, where one needs clear-cut agreement to proceed.

Consent is sexy.

I'm a security guy and I think what he did towards the end is dubious and strange, but again, he was following their guidelines as written.

I disagree. It's not about whether or not he downloaded the data. That is an undisputed fact between both parties.

The question seems to be if he did it in good faith and within the rules of the bug bounty program.

No. The question is whether FB understood the severity of the bug and paid in proportion to its severity. When you run a bounty program, that's what you do.

This whole thing is silly. Facebook (or any other tech company) have a lot of flexibility and hardly any accountability in defining what a "million dollar bug" is. You really can't believe they are going to just hand you over 1m because you think it is a 1m bug. It very well may be but in the end facebook will be the one deciding the value of said bug and you will have nothing to do with their decision so assume they just won't do that.

Sure, they'll be the one deciding. Except, that other bounty hunters are watching their reaction and their fairness in paying out people for their work.

The next $1M bug that gets discovered will probably go out onto the black market because of Mr. Alex's actions here.

No, the free market decides the value of the bug. You can either pay that value to a white hat to find it or wait til a black hat sells it.

Facebook has now demonstrated that they will not only not pay you, but they will attacking you publicly, slander you, and threaten you. Now what does that mean for the next hacker coming along? Someone who is clean and wants to stay clean will avoid Facebook. Someone who isn't will realize that Facebook is now an easier target because of the clean guys staying away.

Exactly this. Facebook have just demonstrated that at best they'll get an anonymous warning and then all their private keys dumpd onto pastebin when they do nothing.

At best.

I don't think he is claiming 1 million for the bugs, he mostly wanted to share the whole story (that title was just to get some eyeballs instead of using maybe "facebook cheated me")

At no point did he take hostages. It's that sort of thinking that lead to all this drama in the first place. He did however disclose, which is pretty reasonable considering a lot of us are trusting these services to protect our information.

What if Instagram blead all your browser information? So people can now fingerprint billions of people and figure out who (and their pictures) are surfing their sites? What if there are pics on instagram that people rely on being private?

Downloading data is where he crossed the line and what I meant by hostage:

"Wes was not happy with the amount we offered him, and responded with a message explaining that he had downloaded data from S3 using the AWS key..."

You make "downloading" sound more sinister than it is. Downloading something from the network is the only way to see that it's there or know what it is. There is no substantial difference between downloading and viewing in this case.

> "With the newly obtained AWS key... I queued up several buckets to download, and went to bed for the night."

This isn't about whether viewing files on an internet is technically downloading them; this is about retrieving files of enough size and quantity that you have to queue them up for an overnight download.

He kept it for a month. That is different than looking at it.

Under the assumption the keys would be revoked it's just trash anyways - it'd have been useless anyways, but apparently they didnt realize how serious stuff was, otherwise they would have revoked it A month is plenty of time to change critical S3 credentials

And how long does your browser cache the pages and assets you've looked at?

"Maybe it's because he's one of several people to disclose the same vulnerability"

The thing that gets me about this whole situation is that Facebook either didn't understand the extent of the vulnerability (which seems to be the case to me, and in which case I think Wes Wineberg should have been rewarded far greater than they did for showing them how serious it was, though I wouldn't say this is literally a "million dollar" bug) or they were grossly negligent for not patching it up a lot sooner than they did. They can't have it both ways.

Are they bad at managing their bug bounty program, or just bad at responding to serious security issues? It has to be one or the other.

I'm not sure you understand how the law works

I'm not sure anyone really understands how the law works when it comes to bug bounty programs and legal retaliation by companies. Is there any case law precedent yet?

In most cases where the opposing parties are one large publicly-traded company and one small company or individual, the law works like this:

* little guy offends large company, usually through some totally well-meaning and innocent activity that, if illegal at all, is only so due to obscure, obsolete, and/or obtuse laws

* large company unleashes unholy wrath of $1000/hr law firm on little guy threatening to destroy little guy's world if he doesn't immediately comply with all demands

* lawyers laugh at the plight of little guy and say it doesn't matter what he thinks because he can't afford to oppose large company

* little guy is forced to comply no matter how absurd large company's demands are, because only other large companies can oppose large company in court

* should the large company feel inclined to sue the little guy even after he acquiesced to their ridiculous demands, little guy loses all of his possessions in his attempt to pay legal fees. little guy will run out of money before the case wraps, resulting in him getting saddled with a judgment for massive personal liability (cf. Power Ventures)

* large company is free to make the same infractions whenever they feel it's appropriate to do so, because what are you gonna do, sue them? (cf. practically every company who has ever brought a CFAA claim; Google's whole business is violating the CFAA, as well as various copyright laws)

* bonus points: large company has friends in the prosecutor's office and gets the little guy brought up on life-destroying criminal charges (cf. Aaron Swartz). if the case makes it to trial, little guy spends time in jail (cf. weev)

I don't think I missed anything.

Total aside: I have a startup idea to throw a wrench into your accurate depiction of how things currently play out: little guy hires full time lawyer from large pool of unemployed lawyers, suddenly has legal counsel at reasonable (relative) price for extended time. Suddenly little guy has more of a fighting chance to fight back against lawsuit, instead of having to pay out his counsel at $1,000/hr. (He can add a full time yearly lawyer at the clip of every 2 weeks of his adversary's costs)

Especially when Facebook expressly authorizes this type of activity (to some degree). The relevant passage is cited in the original article.

I'm not sure in this case, that's true. But whether or not this was illegal I generally support skirting laws if it makes everyone else more secure. To that end, I also support Snowden.

laws aside, USD2500 for all that data? hmmm, is our data that cheap?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com