Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenizerrr | Hacker News Reader

He found a bug, and posted to the bug tracker. Would you have preferred he just shared this with his buddies to crash servers, or attempt to sell it?

View on HN

When you find a bug which amounts to a security vulnerability, you should inform them privately and then make it public after a reasonable amount of time has passed and preferably after it's been fixed. By making it public right from the get-go, anyone who sees this bug report can now attack any system that uses MongoDB. Do you think that's OK?

Is it the height of professionalism? No.

However, I've written similarly irate messages at 4 or 5am, particularly after spending months working on a product. And this level of coding quality is unacceptable in any product which wants to be large-scale deployed on the internet.

It is beyond unprofessional, it's down right dangerous. Obviously the guy is not a security researcher so he's probably not aware of proper disclosure protocol but seeing as he's fully aware this bug is exploitable ("Step 8. REALIZE I CAN CRASH 99% OF ALL WEB 3.9 SHIT-TASTIC WEBSCALE MONGO-DEPLOYING SERVICES WITH 16 BYTE POST") doing it this way is really not excusable, no matter how pissed you are.

Anyone looking for this vulnerability could run a static analyzer on the MongoDB codebase and they would have found this bug already.

Think of it this way - a professional might have done what you're suggesting. Now, any script kiddie can exploit it.

It's not optimal, but it's certainly allowed/ok, and it's far better than NOT posting that in the bugreport forum.

Proper disclosure takes effort. The product owner can offer bounties to motivate others to make that effort for them. But if you can't/won't spend that effort, then it's still better to publish the bug than not publish it.

I agree proper disclosure take effort but even if he was to send them the very same text privately instead of posting it to the bug tracker it would have been better.

Maybe if it's only about getting some bug fixed as soon as possible. But I'd say communicating the "MongoDB is terrible" part of it to the public is pretty valuable too. Because nice to know and the hype doesn't mention that so much.

I'm sure we can come up with a best way to go about things. I'm not really cool with the "oh Mike" part of it. But I think it's mostly okayish. Certainly a lot more okay than the bug.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com