> Their initial reply from the CEO: "I would love to hear what the vulnerability is, but I assume you want to get paid for it. Is that the play?"
Well that’s pretty damning.
Well that’s pretty damning.
If your name is associated with a startup in a visible leadership position you will get mass-spammed from people claiming to have discovered critical vulnerabilities in your system. When you engage with them, the conversation will turn into requests to hire them for their services.
So the CEO handled it poorly, but it's also not a great choice to withhold the details of the vulnerability in initial contact. If the goal was to get something fixed it should have been included in an easy-to-forward e-mail that could have been sent to someone who could act upon it.
Anyone who works with security or bug bounties can tell you that the volume of bad reports was a problem before LLMs. Now that everyone thinks they're going to use LLMs to get gigs as pentesters the volume of reports is completely out of control.
I tried engaging and replying to them, and it inevitably turns into: "Yeah, we don't actually have the vulnerability, but you are totally vulnerable, just let us do a security audit for you".
I have a pre-written reply for these kinds of messages now.
No flying cars? Okay. Nobody traveled much beyond the orbit of the Moon? Dang. But email? We didn't even get reliable privacy separate from identity?
Oh, don't think that outer space will let you escape the misery of email:
> "I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one is working": Artemis II astronauts
I get tons of these messages too and the ones that do include details are the kind of junk you get from free "website vulnerability scanners" that are a bunch of garbage that means nothing -- "missing headers" for things I didn't set on purpose, "information disclosure vulnerabilities" for things that are intentionally there, etc... You can put google.com into these things and get dozens of results.
Their response isn't damning to me. It sounds like they just assume they're one of these spammers.
When the "good Samaritan" do not go to the vendor, they go to the client (i.e., they do not contact the DIB company, they contact the Gov agency).
I have seen government contractors getting pilloried, losing their livelihood when this happened. And, yes there is always a "quick fix offer" by the "good Samaritan" to the vendor and promised re-assurance to the Gov agency, only if this misguided vendor would go with their solution.
It is also not unusual to find out later on, that the identification or even the resource reported on was wrong - but by this time the Gov agency already punished the contractor and the reporting "good Samaritan" is laughing (sometimes to the bank).
they can get away with unethical vulnerability disclosure because think of the children, the threat to the nation, grandma off the cliff, and <insert your favorite cliche justification of malfeasance>.
Yes, sore subject.
The system is already pretty bad because vendors underinvest in security, and then to fix it, researchers have to volunteer their time to investigate with no guarantee of payment. If the vendor could force researchers to hand over findings for free, nobody would want to do security research except hobbyists having fun. They're basically signing up for hours of tedious forced labor to explain vulnerabilities to the vendor.
I wish there was legislation that allowed the government to fine vendors for security vulnerabilities like this where the amount scales based on how much user data they leaked. And it could function like other whistleblower systems where a researcher who spots a leak can report it to the government and collect 50%. That way, if the vendor says, "We're not paying you," the researcher can turn around and collect the money from fines.
It's the same thing with selling general offensive security tools. You have to proactively make it clear that it's for testing and not criminal use. Otherwise, cops are going to assume you're complicit and make things shitty.
Or any other dataset with a hyper targeted demographic.