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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

  > I don't have a problem with criminalizing
  > attempts to pull up random people by their
  > SSN.

If I see that the URL contains my SSN, and want to investigate if they were stupid enough to have this as a security hole, what are my options?

You seem to say that if I pull up the page of someone else, I am immediately a criminal and need to go to jail.

Should I instead report the possible issue to the company? Will they actually take, "I see that SSN is in the URL and that might be security hole, but I don't know for sure because I haven't attempted to try it," seriously? Hopefully they would, but I find that hope to be way more optimistic than the 'real world' should get credit for.

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You don't get to break into a bank because you want to see if you can exploit a security hole.

What you're talking about is more akin to wiggling the bank's door handle and then leaving. What weev did is break in, steal a bunch of documents, and then talk about selling them.

"Breaking in" suggests that there is access control (locks, doors, walls, etc) in place.

ATT admitted in court to publishing this data on the web. Emitting email addresses in response to ICCIDs was a specific feature they explicitly implemented to reduce the number of steps required to resubscribe to service, not a "security hole".

Your physical analogy is inappropriate, and serves to frame his actions as criminal when they are clearly not.

Please read the brief.

> "Breaking in" suggests that there is access control (locks, doors, walls, etc) in place.

No, it doesn't. See, this is what happens when you start talking about crimes on the internet when you really shouldn't be. If I leave all my doors and windows opened, or if I put a box of valuables in the middle of an empty lot that I own, it doesn't suddenly make it legal for people to steal from me.

AT&T leaving their doors and windows open does not suddenly authorize any ol' grody troll to walk in and take personal information.

Whether you like it or not, his crime will be made into a physical analogy.

I _mostly_ agree with you.

How about _this_ analogy?

AT&T left a box of valuables in the middle of a lot they own, and weev walked by and grabbed them. Problem is, they weren't AT&T's valuables, they were mine and yours and 100,000 other peoples who'd entrusted AT&T with them.

Now who's "the bad guy"? Who's the more culpable "criminal"? WHo would we be holding to account if it were a bank who'd piled up the cash from 100,000 people's savings accounts into a building with all its doors and windows open?

Sure, what weev did was wrong. I don't think it was the _only_ wrong done here, or possibly even the "worst" wrong.

I think that's fair. AT&T should be reprimanded for a serious lack of security — how much they should be reprimanded would be another topic for debate.

But it doesn't take away from weev's crime (both this one and his previous harassments.)

Sorry for your distorted reality. You're saying that everyone who accesses unsecured information on a badly secured server gets reprimanded. You're placing the onus of security on the user which makes your point pure BS.

Granted. But how do you propose that AT&T would ever be reprimanded without someone like weev?

I strongly believe that weev should have notified AT&T before Gawker. But if they were unresponsive, as often happens, what then?

On the other hand, when AT&T leaves its doors and windows open 'in the web' they get a free pass from the general public because the technical aspect is lost on them.

If a bank used someone's first and last name as the 'access control' to their money, sure someone breaking in and stealing things is wrong, but should the bank be punished for negligence? Probably. When companies have security breaches 'on a computer' why is this different? Why the free pass? Why is the person that 'broke in,' or that that pointed out the flaw without breaking in the bad guy? Why aren't the companies themselves held to task for creating shoddy controls, and not following best practices when it comes to computer security?

A better example to demonstrate what's going on to the public would be to have a web form that says "Enter your SSN#" and a submit button. People understand that. Changing the terms in the URL bar is voodoo to many people, and this unfortunately leads to the belief that someone exercised nefarious skills to pull off an attack.

Is more like if you wrote out your customers personal data in a book left nailed to a front door that opens onto a public street and then tried to criminalise anyone who looked at pages that weren't relevant to them.

This is somewhat reasonable, since people need to actually come onto your property to access the book. It's probably unreasonable to say that someone was trespassing because they walked up to your door.

No they don't, the door opens onto a public street and the book is nailed to the front of it. This hypothetical book can be read while standing on the sidewalk. Sorry for not being more clear.

sneak said: "Breaking in" suggests that there is access control (locks, doors, walls, etc) in place.

ceol said: No, it doesn't.

I say: Yes it does. Your house has walls and probably a picket fence too. Either one is a boundary. The keyword here is "boundary" and not "locks". Having people's info waiting behind a serial number is not a "boundary" but rather a key-value pair accessible from the public domain. Your house is not accessible from the public domain because you have boundaries. Your servers are accessible from the public domain because you specifically have to put them online and make them accessible. Once you make servers accessible from the public domain then it is your responsibility to safeguard the privacy of what you put there. Weev did not DDoS the servers or inject SQL into their code. He accessed public info. Similarly if you put public info about you on facebook then it is not a security breach if I go there and check it out.

Physical analogies do not work regarding the internet. What happened is like he was given an address, he drove to it in a van, and a screen showed him his email. Then, he extrapolated that the buildings in the block he went to would do something similar, so he drove around to them in a car labeled 'VAN' and they showed emails.

A bank you say? http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2079431/citibank-ha... http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/super-bad-first-sta...

First, you don't actually have the right to conduct security testing on third party servers. Nor should you. Real application security testing is disruptive, and in authorized tests, companies often take pains to ensure that testers aren't exposed to real user data.

Second, if you poke around to confirm the security or insecurity of an application, immediately report results to the target, and comply with requests for information, you may be civilly liable for damages (which it's unlikely anyone would pursue, given the PR implications) but are probably not violating the CFAA even as it's written today (that is: badly).

What is your plan to hold companies to task then? Especially when you can't confirm that your suspicions are correct?

Responsible disclosure? Say that you disclose your concerns to them. How does that play out?

1. They respond to you. They say that it is not a security flaw. You just have to trust them that there is not security flaw.

2. They respond to you, and tell you that they will not fix it. You tell them that if they won't then you'll disclose it to the public. They try to claim that you are extorting them.

3. They don't respond to you. You disclose it to the public. Turns out that it wasn't a security flaw. You are sued for defamation/libel/etc.

4. They don't respond to you. You disclose it to the public. The company has egg on their face and fixes it.

I think that the biggest flaw in the system is that companies are not held to task for their security flaws. I realize that if all software had to be perfect it would cripple the industry, but at the same time there has to be some idea of criminal (or at least civilly liable) negligence for people/companies that don't at least follow best practices.

I don't think random strangers on the Internet conducting unauthorized testing are really making much of a difference either way, so the prospect of changing how much of that goes on doesn't really factor in for me.

What if you are not a random stranger but someone whose information they hold and may be improperly securing?

The best way may be to get another user to allow you to try entering their social security number to see what happens. I don't see that the company could have any issue in that case.

If you're asking, do I think people who do independent unauthorized security testing of applications to protect their own information make a big difference in the real world, my guess is "no".

My response was poor because I was responding to your post 'random internet user' and also your ancestor post about the right to do basic independent unauthorized security testing without being clear. I think I objected to the characterization of the people with something to lose as "random internet users" which I inferred from your posts and you may not have stated.

Having said that I have certainly read of a number of cases where a difference has been made although it may not be a big difference to the overall world.

And while manually fiddling a couple of URL parameters would seem to me a valid sanity check of the service you were using I don't think that would give you the right to run nmap against their servers looking for vulnerabilities or running an automated fuzzing of the URL parameters or crawling the returned results.

This does not mean that I think the crimes with which Weev was charged or the sentence is remotely appropriate. From what I have read he may deserve to be in jail (mostly for harassment, threats and blackmail) but that is what he should be charged with not this AT&T case. Given that he eventually handed the data over to a journalist I would give him a lighter sentence (if any and I was judge/jury) than I would give to AT&T (if it was in the UK and I was the Information Commisioner). I don't know of any data protection requirements in the US (for non-health data) so they may not actually have been criminal but they certainly were negligent.

Then what's the point of all the bug bounty programs out there?

First, that's not unauthorized testing. Bug bounty programs attract better, more talented testers, because they're compensated and (just as importantly) because they take much of the risk out of testing 3rd party services (a company that offers a bug bounty will have a hard time freaking out about bugs when they're reported).

Second, the companies that offer bug bounties tend to be ones that often spend well into 7-8 figures on security already.

If you can access your own record without authentication shouldn't that be good enough proof? Why do you need to access everyone else's information illegally to prove that your own is available without proper controls in place?

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