Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

> Baseten handled this well. The timeline was:

> July 13, 11:10 PM: I reported the live basetenbot token, the public Harbor project, and the repository permissions.

> July 14, morning: Baseten made the Harbor project private. I flagged that the token itself still worked.

> July 14, 4:34 PM: Anton from Baseten Security confirmed the issue as critical and said they had made the Harbor project private and rotated the token. He also asked us to securely delete the images we'd pulled.

> July 14, 5:05 PM: We confirmed deletion and sent over two lower-severity findings from the same scan.

> July 17: Baseten closed out the remaining findings.

> September: We let Baseten know we planned to disclose the finding publicly and sent them a draft of this post.

They also sent us some T-shirts and sweatshirts as a thank-you for finding this critical bug.

well done all around. i think my only open question is what default security boundaries should all vibecoded internal agents follow as a learning we can take from this

Good in terms of prompt communication and fix. Absurdly bad in terms of reward.

Earlier in the article, it mentions that Baseten is valued at $13B. They can't dig into their couch cushions to give a few thousand dollars to the researcher privately disclosing a bug that let an attacker escalate to admin in their GitHub org?

This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.

Yeah companies need to quickly understand that having good actors try and hack you is a good thing - those hacks get reported and another door gets sealed shut for bad actors.

This is more true today than ever before as the bar for a successful attack has never been lower. We’ll see a resurgence of the script-kiddie, or shall I say, vibe-kiddie :-/

Swag packages like these are a token of appreciation not a reward.

The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .

Most people who find a dropped wallet will return it without evaluating the market value of your compromised identity or the contents of the wallet .

Grateful owners may buy you a beer that doesn’t make them cheap , not everything is evaluated in purely money terms, and that is a good thing ?

Wallets usually belong to real people with lives. We can empathize with them. Companies are not people. And they also don't and can't empathize with you.

"and can't empathize with you" - I don't really understand why such a perception of companies has been regurgitated and reinforced so much in US public, to the point where it's a blank excuse from ever expecting such a thing from a company. It's not true that it can't. The only reason to keep repeating that kind of worldview is to absolve companies behaving in shitty, toxic or downright evil ways.

The law doesn't say companies MUST choose the most profitable choice at every turn, and even explicitly allows for good treatment of customers, community, employees etc as a viable business strategy (even if it's sad that it must be justified in that way).

I think the point is that companies are purely legal entities, and as such, cannot feel, much less empathize, simply by virtue of them not being living things

That's nonsense. "Companies" are not something non-human, they are run by humans, who do feel, empathize, and are living beings. Without these living-being humans, there would simply be no "company".

Now how those humans that run the company behave is another thing - they are free to be greedy assholes, and a lot of them are, and some of them aren't - but that's still a human thing.

> "Companies" are not something non-human

Yes, they are not humans. They are not even living creatures. They are mostly-legal entities mostly for the purpose of contracting with humans or other legal entities.

> they are run by humans, who do feel, empathize, and are living beings

This is usually true, but it is orthogonal to whether the company (a legal entity) itself is a biologically living creature, which is the only thing capable of feeling*. To put a point on it: my lawnmower is also run by humans, but it does not have empathy for any grass or people that gets in its way. It mostly just goes where it is steered. A company is like that, except with less touching grass.

* — unless you want to argue semantics about what "feeling" means, even though the discussion is about "feeling" and "empathy" in the way humans experience it, and how that form of "empathy" does not exist for a nonliving legal entity which may or may not employ any actual humans

This pointless internet interaction is over.

I agree that this notion that companies make these decisions is bad, bad on the grounds that it's people working for those companies that make the decisions, they hide themselves away, but the company itself isn't doing anything - is always a human making the decision

> The only reason to keep repeating that kind of worldview is to absolve companies behaving in shitty, toxic or downright evil ways.

Or...to warn people away from ever expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies, and remind people not to trust them?

I think the only misleading part of this situation is your naive and self-centered definition of "trust", and the assumption that so many others think similarly enough that they need to be warned.

I trust a business to fulfill their obligations as stated in writing for the money paid. I do not trust them in any other way. Nobody should "trust" or depend on undefined behavior. Common sense can only ever be as common as you expect.

> your naive and self-centered definition of "trust"

I never gave one? For what it's worth, I agree with your second paragraph, despite your first being needlessly aggressive.

> expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies

> expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies, and [another thing, which is not the same thing as the first thing but merely similar or related]

It is a fact that it can't. Because company is not something tangible. It can't feel or think.

As for companies being shit, that's just capitalism, but plenty of people believe that's the only way.

>Wallets usually belong to real people with lives.

So does data ? it belongs to real people.

I would imagine baseten's customers and eventually their end-users[1] were also grateful that their data was not compromised here and the disclosure was responsible.

[1] There is a pretty good chance you and I could be using services who are using baseten

Companies are 100% people. The fact that companies, their CEOs, and employees are not treated like people is exactly reason why humanity is in the shitshow show it is right now.

> The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .

not always, especially if its just someone independent. iirc there was a guy here not too long ago who started dropping Windows 0days because Microsoft couldn't be assed to process his bug reports

That actually supports the point that people aren't acting under purely financial motivations. If the guy was purely following financial motivations, surely he would have chosen to sell the vulnerabilities to the shadier side of things. Instead, he dumped them publicly, burning their value while amplifying the "fuck you" factor to Microsoft.

Ignoring reports, or just fixing the vulnerability without acknowledging the work put in by a researcher, is rude and invites rudeness in return.

Microsoft runs a bug bounty program. NightmareEclipse (that’s the researcher’s handle) allegedly participated and Microsoft did not honor their part of the bug bounty program terms.

This is a completely different situation - a company evaluates the security of a prospective vendor prior to entering a business agreement.

> iirc there was a guy here not too long ago who started dropping Windows 0days because Microsoft couldn't be assed to process his bug reports

Did that ever actually happen? I remember him threatening to start dropping 0days and getting a lot of press coverage for it. When I tried to look it up I didn’t find anything at the time.

> New Microsoft Defender 'ShieldCrash' zero-day grants SYSTEM access

https://bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-microsoft-def...

“Nightmare Eclipse released these zero-day exploits as part of an ongoing dispute with Microsoft over the company's bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure practices. […] Since April, the anonymous security researcher has disclosed a long list of zero-day flaws, including ShieldBreak, LegacyHive, RoguePlanet, BlueHammer, RedSun, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, MiniPlasma, and UnDefend, targeting Microsoft Defender, BitLocker, and other Windows components.”

of course not, all they can do is a lil "thx"

> This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.

of course, these companies want you to sell vulns to brokers and other orgs. they don't care about bug reports.

otherwise they'd pay as much or even more, right?

The researcher in this case was doing a security review for their company who was a potential customer. Sending potential customers more than a token amount of cash is usually prohibited by corporate ethics rules for obvious reasons.

That's incorrect. It's not only perfectly acceptable, but absolutely vital, to pay someone for their services (incl a customer) for assisting with an existential threat against the corporation.

Any counsel or HR who would draft a corporate ethics rule that wouldn't allow for a bug bounty to be paid out on a massive vulnerability, merely because the person was "a potential customer", should be immediately replaced.

> Absurdly bad in terms of reward

This is two companies working together. Most of the comments below are assuming this was an independent security researcher doing work on their own time. This was professionals doing work for their companies on both sides.

> This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.

The reason they were looking for bugs was in the context of a B2B relationship, not as a someone independent on their nights and weekends.

If they give them any additional compensation it would probably be in some amount of free or discounted services, which is what they’d want anyway.

The main payment is all the viral advertising that this AI hacking tool is getting right now. Hard to put a price on that.

Literally paid in exposure.

if it were my company I'd not pay a dime if the researcher was going to make a big public blog post about a security issue in my infrastructure that I promised customers was secure.

I'm sure the cash value of the advertisement here is worth more than a bug bounty would pay.

This is probably still considered standard response timeline, not a rapid one.

The time window allowing for CVEs + Vulnerabilities remediation has been collapsing to days and hours perhaps even minutes[1]. Anyone who has an OpenRouter account can start using Strix + GLM 5.3 Flash to do damages at frontier Mytho 5 level cyber capabilities. [2]

This cyber patching race is on, won't stop until all the software created for the past 70 years still in active use needs to be patched up. This is happening at EVERY SINGLE software company.

The cost of not doing it? Game over.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49699402

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49705036

Meanwhile I have customers running legacy web apps last compiled over five years ago on end-of-life operating systems… and it’s crickets chirping. Dead quiet, not even a hint of an attack, let alone a breach.

I expected them to have been hacked to pieces by now, but even “maximally vulnerable” internet-facing apps seem to be relatively unmolested so far.

Maybe it’s still too expensive to go after “boring” enterprise targets? Maybe the bad actors targeted crypto systems first for the immense payoffs, if successful?

> it’s still too expensive to go after “boring” enterprise targets?

The economic argument seems convincing to me. I can’t tell what your stance on it is.

You’re the only one that knows the value of these targets, but “not worth it” seems likely to me.

It's a risk-reward ratio, same as anything else, whether legal or illegal.

You wouldn't organise the equivalent of an elaborate bank heist to break into a child's piggy bank, it's just not worth it.

I have heard of a few high profile crypto heists that appear to be AI-assisted, some as far back as the GPT 3.5 era. There was an article I can't find any more about someone accidentally pushing a security fix to a public repo and getting their wallets drained via that specific mechanism within something like an hour.

Malicious actors are watching crypto like a cat in front of a mouse hole, because a "success" can net them the equivalent of hundreds of millions of USD that they can instantly transfer, launder, and spend.

For comparison, what would they achieve by hacking the web site of a local council or public library? Cause some embarrassment? Attempt to crypto-locker them? What are the chances of a payout? Certainly not a 100%, and you're also certain to get the attention of the local equivalent of the FBI or Homeland Security.

Anyone can push people onto the railway tracks at a metro station but they don't. Being able to cause damage doesn't mean people will.

I’d treat a vibecoded agent like an untrusted CI job, not like a junior employee: repo-scoped identity, read-only by default, no inherited Actions token or production secrets. Any operation that turns a read into a write should require approval outside the agent’s control and produce an auditable diff. Network egress belongs in the boundary too. Read-only access is not much protection if the agent can send everything it reads to an arbitrary endpoint.

Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.

> They also sent us some T-shirts and sweatshirts as a thank-you for finding this critical bug.

Honestly I would have held out for a (hard to get) hardcover copy of Inference Engineering.

signed too!

Shouldn't the first step have been to roll the token?

Did you get their permission before running this test?

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