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Comment by dannyallan | Hacker News Reader

Snyk Research Labs regularly contributes back to the community with testing and research of common software packages. This particular research into Cursor was not intended to be malicious and included Snyk Research Labs and the contact information of the researcher. We were very specifically looking at dependency confusion in some VS Code extensions. The packages would not be installed directly by a developer.

Snyk does follow a responsible disclosure policy and while no one picked this package up, had anyone done so, we would have immediately followed up with them.

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Spraying your attack into the public with hopes of hitting your target is the polar opposite of responsible. The only "good" part of this is that you were caught in the act before anyone else got hit in the crossfire.

In response, you suggest that you'll send a letter of apology to the funeral home of anyone that got hit. Compromising their credentials, even if you have "good intentions", still puts them into a compromised position and they have to react the same as they would for any other malevolent attacker.

This is so close to "malicious" that it's hard to perceive a difference.

edit: Let's also remind everyone that a Snyk stakeholder is currently attempting to launch a Cursor competitor, so assuming good intentions is even MORE of a stretch.

Cool. Why phone home the user's environment, then? The vulnerability could very much be confirmed by simply sending a stub instead of live envs.

This is grey-hat at best. Intent may have been good, but the fact is that this team created and distributed software to access and exfiltrate data without permission which is very illegal. You may want to consult with the legal department before posting about this on a public forum fyi.

Seems reasonable enough, but why would it (allegedly) send environment variables back via a POST? Even if it's entirely in good faith, I'd rather some random package not have my `env` output..

Not allegedly. They confirmed it themselves.

https://snyk.io/blog/snyk-security-labs-testing-update-curso...

Upvoting this since presumably you're actually the CTO at Snyk and people should see your official response, but wow this feels wildly irresponsible. You could have proved the PoC without actually stealing innocent developer credentials. Furthermore, additional caution should have been taken given the conflict of interest with the competitor product to Cursor. Terrible decision making and terrible response.

What is responsible about sending the environment over in a proof of concept?

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