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Comment by djcapelis | Hacker News Reader

Everytime someone writes a tool to show what is possible in public, there's some jerk giving them a hard time about it. Don't be that jerk. The function of the security community is to help people realize when they're not safe. No one likes having their bubble burst, but it's important that it get burst or people don't fix the problems. We've seen this over, and over, and over. Find a good way to improve security that is nicer for everyone involved and actually works and a lot of people in the community will listen and will legitimately care, promise.

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"The function of the security community is to help people realize"

You say that because you are not on the other end of this and don't suffer any of the consequences as a result of the actions of people who create some of these things which make it for sure easier for more people to exploit systems.

Please don't take this as an attack but your perspective is based upon your job [1] and your apparent lack of exposure to how people have to scramble and are actually impacted by certain types of disclosures. I mean the end users of the technology. Who in no way are in a position to get the vendors to do anything or make things more secure, in general.

This is for sure different from vendors and developers needing to write secure code and not make mistakes.

So have a bit of empathy. Not appropriate to call parent commenter, imo, a "jerk".

[1] "I'm a hacker in the computer science department at the University of California"

I'd like to offer a different perspective. You're free to dismiss me as well because I currently have a similar job description to 'djcapelis, but I've also been a sysadmin and front-line IT security guy (watching IDSes, patching systems), so I have a pretty good idea what the commoditization of exploit code means.

I think that things like metasploit and heartleech are an almost purely unalloyed good. In my experience, the "bad guys" already have easy-to-use tools. What publicly available tools do is give defenders access to these techniques, which they can use to demonstrate that problems really are a Big Deal. There is a certain kind of person (who seem to gravitate towards management) that cannot be convinced to take an issue seriously unless they can see the impact with their own eyes. A tool that prints out the private key of their production server is worth a dozen blog posts and security advisories as far as convincing them the danger is real.

Yup.

Getting a private key using the extent simple scrypts is quite complicated, with lots of difficult steps. This is no barrier to teenage kids, who has lots of time on their hands that can play around until they get things right.

As a defender, however, you don't have that much time. For you, it's really easy. If you have a server, and want to know if the private key is visible, just download the Windows heartleech binary from github, run it against a server, walk away for 10 hours, and then come back to see if it's gotten the key.

In short, as you say, a tool that effortlessly prints the private key of a production server is worth a bazillion blogposts and security advisories. Code or GTFO, IMO :)

Exactly, how many people didn't really care about unencrypted requests over public WiFi networks until everyone and their grandson could install Firesheep? Tools to make that attack had been available forever, but only after Firesheep did many people finally accept that basically any authenticated request should be done over a secure channel.

For a huge majority of folks, some unfortunately in the position of making decisions and policy surrounding security, the attack just isn't real until there's a nicely usable and widely available tool.

You're making bad assumptions and your logic doesn't hold water. I have very much worked on teams responsible for protecting computers from breaking zero days. Most memorable for me was probably when the Debian SSH key generation bug was released. I was there that morning, writing a scanner to find all the vulnerable machines my team was responsible for (and actually racing against the scanner a colleague on my former team who had responsibility for the whole org's security was writing) and trying to get them patched as quick as possible. (Most of ours were found and patched by the time my former team put up their version of the list out, and another bunch had been patched before their scan even got to them, so we did a good job that day.) What I'm trying to say is, I know exactly what it's like. That operational experience informs my work today even though I don't have a large operational role for many machines these days. (I'm only responsible for about 40-60 machines now.)

That all aside, the job of the security community is not to make your life or my life easier. And neither you or the person I was replying to gets to be angry at someone for exposing a problem because it inconveniences you or your colleagues.

The only thing that will do you any good is to fix your shit.

Pretending that it is someone else's fault that you have to scramble to fix your shit is not okay. I think my comment was phrased bluntly, but was both truthful and appropriate. I understand the emotions that cause it, but no one who blames others for their own problems has much high ground to stand on when it comes to empathy.

I mean the end users of the technology. Who in no way are in a position to get the vendors to do anything or make things more secure, in general.

Writing offensive security tools is bound to get the attention of the vendors, to cause a storm that will get attention from the vendors.

What you're advocating amounts to shooting the messenger. How dare some person write software that disrupts your falsely ingrained peace of mind.

The fact of the matter is, vendors have been notorious throughout the ages for not listening to the security community. So many easily preventable mistakes have led to so many breaches.

Well, it's time to get people to listen. What better way to do that then demonstrate, first-hand, the gravity of their errors?

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