Help Us Tell Telly That They Have Exposed 8M Subscribers

Disclosure of vulnerabilities over the last decade has been a challenge and there are lots of different views on how things should be handled no doubt. And it is clear that we are now running into the same issues with data breaches, in terms of vendors/organization being non-responsive, as in the past with vulnerability reporting.

However, to be clear the CERT guideline you pasted refers to vulnerabilities in software, and not open data on the Internet, ie: an active data breach.

If you look at the CERT FAQ as to why 45 days you see this:

------------------------ Q: Why not 30 days, or 15 days, or immediately?

A: We think that 45 days can be a pretty tough deadline for a large organization to meet. Making it shorter won't realistically help the problem. In the absence of evidence of exploitation, gratuitously announcing vulnerabilities may not be in the best interest of public safety. --------------------

That 45 day timeline is referencing an organization having the ability to fix the vulnerability, and getting the patches out to affected customers so they can implement.

The Telly situation is different. There is an open database exposing customer data (which is simple to correct btw) and they are non-responsive, ie: not even ack'ing the issue or asking for more time to correct the issue. The post does not provide the location of the data, nor details such as a typical vulnerability report would include on how to exploit the software.

Many people will have their own view points on a situation such as this, but the real focus should be on getting the database removed from the Internet as quick as possible, and Telly taking the proper action ASAP.