There are countless examples of people getting burned rather than rewarded or even thanked for bringing to attention some sort of flaw. My advice is do not bother. There is almost no upside for you and likely very significant downsides.
There are countless examples of people getting burned rather than rewarded or even thanked for bringing to attention some sort of flaw. My advice is do not bother. There is almost no upside for you and likely very significant downsides.
Second this motion. The number of vendors or administrators who respond well to security or privacy reports is tiny.
Some approximate data from my own emails. I've reported just over 120 security or privacy bugs over the past 4-5 years that this email address goes back (using my real name). I tag the emails, but searching "from:me vulnerability" brings them up. It is like a scoreboard of horrible vendors and site administrators.
From the most recent 100, there are around 25 with no reply at all. I know that some of those, such as government sites were followed up on the phone. Of those with a "(1)" in the thread meaning an additional message, most are me sending a reminder or trying to work out who to contact.
There are then a group of replies where they confirm receipt of the email, but then never confirm the actual contents of what i've reported. Scanning the threads, this looks like another 30 or so emails.
Then there is the group who confirm or deny the bug or parts but get into prolonged technical arguments, with around a dozen threads stretching beyond 10+ emails into arguments about if it is a bug or not.
Last group is those who get the bugs fixed and respond well. In these cases there are only a very small number where the threads are short - most involve long conversations. Some of these are still open - I just reminded myself that I have an open privacy issue with a large web company that still hasn't been fixed. That thread is 30+ emails long.
Overall more than half either didn't reply or didn't confirm the bug (silently fixed or not). There is a messy middle full of long threads and replies that are full of frustration and then only a tiny number of reports where they just get fixed with minimal effort (and you know who these companies are).
There is not a single instance of a non-software company responding well to a bug report (usually from a custom web app), and that includes some well known brands (banks, etc.). The number of good experiences I could count on one hand.
In terms of vendors, recent examples are a 20+ email thread over 3 weeks debating a vendor about severity of a group of bugs (still ongoing), two reasonably well-known vendors with no reply and a well-known vendor who only fixed after more than a month.
You can work out before reporting an issue who the good vendors are. They have a page dedicated to security with contact info, a key and a proper reporting program (preferably with a bounty). With everyone else, you are working for free, wasting your time, not making the internet any more secure and run the risk of getting into trouble - in some countries that could involve legal trouble (there have been a number of raids as a result of security reports in Australia, and the government head of privacy here said there is no such things as a white hat report).
whole range of options, researchers usually find what they prefer and how they prefer to do it organically and opinions (broadly) tend to shift the longer you have been in the field.
To be clear, we have absolutely zero evidence that the IT staff at the hospital ever accused him of anything or claimed he did anything wrong. Apparently they didn't respond and tell him thanks, but given that they knew who it was, if the hospital thought it was a crime, surely they would have contacted the authorities.
In any case, neither article named the professor until he came forward, so I'm not sure how even the extremely mild misinterpretations of the case could be called libel, exactly.
All in all, this isn't exactly a cut-and-dried case of curious white-hat smeared by the government and media. There are plenty of those to go around. We needn't invent more.
[1] http://www.thenewsstar.com/story/news/local/2014/08/19/conwa...
[2] http://www.scmagazine.com/professor-hacks-university-health-...
I'd be pretty annoyed to see that written about me after I had emailed the server owners and informed them that they were hosting patients' personal data on an open ftp server. It'd merely be piss-poor coming from some random local newspaper, and we often tend to dismiss it because technology is complicated egghead stuff; but, this is a website that claims its audience is "IT Professionals" which makes it really irresponsible and the reporter ought to know better. caveat: Given that the professor's story is legit.
http://samsclass.info/125/proj11/LSU-HIPAA2.pdf
I had the same initial question about why he was reacting so strongly but people sending letters to your college administration demanding action is something of an existential threat to someone who teaches ethical hacking.
They removed that information from the site and probably no one with ill intent accessed it. However, the security situation at that institution would be in better shape today if there had been an open discussion about this leak and its implications. Because I didn't feel comfortable approaching decision makers about this without risking retaliation against me, that discussion never happened.
A student in Montreal was expelled after informing the college where he studied that there was a security flaw http://business.financialpost.com/2013/07/17/montreal-studen...
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/20/youth-expelled-from-...
But if you suspect you could get burned for pointing it out, you can take steps to mitigate it. Anonymity for example. Then again if you are in it for the fame and recognition, getting burned is a risk you are taking out of vanity.
If I find a bug in a piece of software, or something misconfigured, I tend to report it and move on. I don't try to hide my identity before reporting it. A security vulnerability is just a bug or misconfiguration, that happens to be exploitable for nefarious purposes. The responsible thing to do is to notify those responsible, and anonymity doesn't help with that; they may need to follow up to ask questions to find out more details about it.
While there are some people in the security community who are prima donnas, who try to hype them selves and their exploits to gain recognition, this case does not appear to have anything to do with that. This is someone who sent a private email to those responsible, and then started seeing articles online and getting complaints emailed to his college about irresponsible hacking of other institutions websites in front of students.
The fact is that journalists today are too busy writing linkbait headlines and getting page clicks to bother with details like accuracy or ethics. Researchers need to look at stories like this one and realize that journalists are not your friends, even if they write nice things about you or hang out with you at parties.
This journalist probably thought he was doing this guy a favor by writing about him.
Most everyone looks the other way in this business and there's a large amount of lying about credentials & experience to land jobs.
Years ago I realised that security bug reporting is a painful experience at best, from about 2006 I decided I'd stop tracking and reporting software security bugs that I find, which while not the optimal solution has made my life a lot less stressful.