[HN Gopher] Accessing Max Verstappen's passport and PII through ...
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       Accessing Max Verstappen's passport and PII through FIA bugs
        
       Author : galnagli
       Score  : 605 points
       Date   : 2025-10-22 18:21 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ian.sh)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ian.sh)
        
       | intheitmines wrote:
       | Just out of interest have you had any legal threats etc from this
       | kind of probing if they don't have explicit bug bounty programs?
       | Also do you ever get offered bounties in on reporting where there
       | wasn't a program?
        
         | forgotaccount22 wrote:
         | When I was still in university I reported a vulnerability and
         | when the company started threatening me with legal action, my
         | professor wrote a strongly worded email and they dropped it.
         | Haven't had it since in 8 years. Feels like many companies
         | understand what we do now, atleast compared to 10 years ago.
        
           | SirHumphrey wrote:
           | This seems depressingly common in universities. I know of a
           | case where someone discovered anyone with a university
           | account (so students, etc.) can edit DNS, and the IT tried to
           | file charges until the head of CS department intervened.
        
             | technothrasher wrote:
             | Many years ago when I was at school, I found a paper on a
             | table in the computing library with a list of root
             | passwords for some of the machines at Yale, just sitting
             | there. I tried one and it was valid (this was the old days
             | when remote root logins were a thing). I sent the admins a
             | message telling them, and I was entirely ignored. A month
             | later I tried the password again and it was still good.
             | Luckily for me, I guess, it was before the days of suing
             | people for trying to be helpful.
        
         | iancarroll wrote:
         | Actual legal threats are uncommon but I have seen some
         | companies try to offer a bribe disguised as a retroactive bug
         | bounty program, in exchange for not publishing. Obviously it is
         | important to decline that.
        
           | intheitmines wrote:
           | Thanks, its cool to hear attitudes have changed.
        
           | gausswho wrote:
           | Decline because it'd mean you were profiting off of a crime?
           | Or that the opportunity of publishing has higher value than
           | the bribe?
        
             | LoganDark wrote:
             | Decline because the public deserves to know the company has
             | that approach to security.
        
             | seb1204 wrote:
             | Take the Money and have someone else publish it
        
         | zozbot234 wrote:
         | The kind of probing they did and described in the blogpost,
         | with the attempt to raise their privileges to admin _is_
         | legally fishy AIUI. Usually this kind of thing would be part of
         | a formal, agreed-to  "red teaming" or "penetration testing"
         | exercise, precisely to avoid any kind of legal liability and
         | establish necessary guidelines. Calling an attempted access
         | "ethical" after the fact is not enough.
        
           | iancarroll wrote:
           | Good-faith security research[0] is the only way this industry
           | will move forward, for better or worse. It is clear that most
           | companies do not want to invest in anything further like
           | VDPs.
           | 
           | [0] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/department-
           | justice-a...
        
           | bitexploder wrote:
           | Without any sort of formally posted bug bounty program
           | explicitly authorizing this sort of activity the CFAA
           | prohibits unauthorized access of "protected computers". I
           | would classify this as legally risky. If FIA had a stick up
           | their ass they could definitely come after the researcher.
           | The researcher's ethical standing is pretty clean in my book,
           | but this was definitely a little more than just changing a
           | URL parameter (only a little more). I would say this is
           | unsafe to do if you are in the united states. The stopping
           | point was somewhere around "I think I could provide the admin
           | role" and reaching out to the best contact you can find and
           | say "Hey, I am an ethical white hat security researcher and I
           | noticed X and Y and in my experience when I see this there is
           | a pretty reasonable chance this privilege escalation
           | vulnerability exists. The chance it exists is high enough in
           | my experience that you should treat it like it exists and
           | examine your authorization code. If you would like I can
           | validate this on my end as well if you give me permission to
           | examine this issue. I am an ethical security researcher" --->
           | point over to your website and disclosed issues if you got
           | em. To just do it is ehh... I would not take the risk.
           | However if I /did/ do it I would definitely disclose it to
           | them immediately and give an explanation like the above.
           | Shooting the messenger in this case would be pretty asinine,
           | especially if they didn't access anything sensitive, that
           | would preclude FIA from having any evidence you did anything
           | sketchy (cause you did not). The reason I would not do it is
           | because you never know if a system like this pre-fetches
           | data, etc. and that is definitely opening you up to liability
           | of possessing PII etc. Overall, I have disclosed issues like
           | this in the past without actually exploiting the issue to
           | good results. Some times companies ignore it. You can always
           | say "If you do not want to treat this issue as a
           | vulnerability I am going to write this up on my website as an
           | example of things you should probably not do" if you feel
           | ethically compelled to force them to change without actually
           | exploiting the issue. People tend to get the message and do
           | something.
        
             | squigz wrote:
             | I'd highly recommend adding some newlines to such comments.
             | Walls of text are not fun to read.
        
           | trollbridge wrote:
           | ... so you'd prefer that the only people doing this will be
           | black-hat hackers who then sell the information on the black
           | market?
        
         | Nextgrid wrote:
         | What he did there could indeed be legally risky.
         | 
         | Remember that while for a lot of us this kind of security
         | research & remediation is "fun", "the right thing to do", etc
         | there are also people in our industry that are completely
         | incompetent, don't care about the quality of their work or
         | whether it puts anyone at risk. They lucked their way into
         | their position and are now moving up the ranks.
         | 
         | To such a person, your little "security research" adventure is
         | the difference between a great day pretending to look busy and
         | a terrible day actually being busy explaining themselves to
         | higher ups (and potentially regulators) and get a bunch of
         | unplanned work to rectify the issue (while they don't care
         | personally whether the site is vulnerable - otherwise they
         | wouldn't have let such a basic vulnerability slip through - now
         | that there is a paper trail they _have_ to act). They
         | absolutely have a reason and incentive to blame you and attempt
         | legal action to distract everyone from their incompetence.
         | 
         | The only way to be safe against such retaliation is to operate
         | anonymously like an actual attacker. You can always reveal your
         | identity later if you desire, but it gives you an effectively
         | bulletproof shield for cases where you do get a hostile
         | response.
        
           | aleph_minus_one wrote:
           | > while they don't care personally whether the site is
           | vulnerable - otherwise they wouldn't have let such a basic
           | vulnerability slip through
           | 
           | Even if they _do_ care personally (which I would assume _is_
           | often the case if the respect person is not an ignorant
           | careerist), they often don 't have the
           | 
           | - organizational power
           | 
           | - (office-)political backing
           | 
           | - necessary very qualified workforce
           | 
           | to be capable of deeply analyzing every line of code that
           | gets deployed. :-(
        
         | Kaibu wrote:
         | In Germany, the case of a company called "Modern Solution" has
         | gained quite a bit of traction. An IT guy found a password,
         | tried it on the company's phpmyadmin and reported that he could
         | access their data. They sued him and the case went up to the
         | highest German court, which acknowledged the lower court's
         | decision to rule with the company. The IT guy got fined.
         | 
         | https://www.heise.de/news/Bundesverfassungsgericht-lehnt-Bes...
         | (German article)
        
           | aleph_minus_one wrote:
           | Some additional relevant information:
           | 
           | When the changes that toughened the SS 202 StGB were made in
           | 2007, there were a lot of public rallies against it in which
           | many programmers participated. These were ignored by the
           | politicians in power. This (together with other worrying
           | political events) even lead to a temporary upcoming of a new
           | party (Piratenpartei) in Germany.
           | 
           | The fact that these rallies were ignored by the politicians
           | in power lead to the situation that from then on by many
           | programmers the German politicians got considered to be about
           | as trustworthy as child molesters who have relapsed several
           | times.
        
           | anal_reactor wrote:
           | Lesson: instead of being the good guy and reporting shit,
           | just sell it on black market.
        
             | 2rsf wrote:
             | (playing the devil's advocate here) But that's not the
             | case- if you find someone's physical keys in the street,
             | will try to open the neighbor's door with it? so why is it
             | ok to use a password that you "found" to log into a site?
        
               | abustamam wrote:
               | Curiosity. I once dropped my keys on the way to my
               | leasing office. I searched the entire complex and office
               | for my keys. Then I saw a guy at the mailboxes trying to
               | open each one, one by one.* I asked if he needed help and
               | he just said he found some keys on the ground and wanted
               | to find out who they belonged to. They were mine. And my
               | mailbox was in the other side of the complex so all bets
               | were off for him anyway.
               | 
               | It costs next to nothing to try out a key in multiple
               | places in the same proximity. Once you start going door
               | to door using a random key you found, that's suspicious.
               | 
               | *it occurs to me now that I write this that this behavior
               | is suspicious as well and probably illegal. He should
               | have turned it into the leasing office.
        
               | mmmlinux wrote:
               | that actually maybe super illegal if they are usps
               | mailboxes.
        
               | abustamam wrote:
               | They... Probably are? They were my complexs mailboxes but
               | only usps has access to them.
        
               | garyfirestorm wrote:
               | Instructions unclear - any key I find now onwards I'll
               | mail it to this guys leasing office.
        
               | somehnguy wrote:
               | I don't think the common analogy of "key to a house"
               | makes any sense. For starters, a significant portion of
               | people in existence aren't trying to break into your
               | house 24/7.
        
               | anal_reactor wrote:
               | No, it's different. I would compare it to my neighbor
               | using a padlock with code combination. It takes 15
               | minutes to brute-force that. If I tell my neighbor that
               | his padlock is shit and in response he sues me to
               | oblivion, next time I'll just tell local thugs "hey
               | here's the padlock, here's the code, do what you must",
               | zero regrets, if the asshole insists on being an asshole
               | just for the shits and giggles then so will I.
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | If I don't try the keys in my neighbor's door, how will I
               | know which neighbor they belong?
        
       | luxuryballs wrote:
       | well at least it was a password hash :D
        
         | dmitrygr wrote:
         | Don't get too excited. They never said what kind of hash. Given
         | the rest of the site's security design, might have easily been
         | unsalted md5
        
           | auxiliarymoose wrote:
           | Or maybe rot26 -- I've heard it's twice as secure as rot13!
        
             | mulmen wrote:
             | It's 2025, you should at least be on rot52.
             | 
             | Best practice guide:
             | https://github.com/killerk3emstar/rot52
        
               | auxiliarymoose wrote:
               | Ah, thanks! Hard to keep up with this stuff. Next thing
               | you know the boffins will tell us we need to switch to
               | rot104 or even rot208 because of "post-quantum
               | cryptography" or something.
        
         | Group_B wrote:
         | There's probably another rockyou out there waiting to happen
        
       | GEBBL wrote:
       | Strange, the site is run by an Ian Carroll, but the examples show
       | Sam Curry, who is a very famous bug bounty hunter.
        
         | captnasia wrote:
         | if you look at his other posts, it looks like they collaborate
         | often.
        
         | gregschlom wrote:
         | From the post:
         | 
         | "Having been able to attend these events by hoarding airline
         | miles and schmoozing certain cybersecurity vendors, Gal Nagli,
         | Sam Curry, and I thought it would be fun to try and hack some
         | of the different supporting websites for the Formula 1 events."
        
       | cathalc wrote:
       | That is _shamefully_ poor security.
        
         | gnerd00 wrote:
         | wait until you see the party footage
        
         | daemonologist wrote:
         | It's hard to even call it security - it was just wide open...
         | 
         | I will say though, this kind of thing does wonders for my
         | imposter syndrome.
        
       | whatever1 wrote:
       | Just use a framework to build your site. Don't reinvent the
       | wheel!
        
         | ChaseRensberger wrote:
         | i respectfully disagree with this sentiment. i think that in
         | general, reinventing the wheel can be a great learning
         | opportunity in understanding how the wheel works.
        
           | AnimalMuppet wrote:
           | It can. But it can be very bad at producing wheels that don't
           | break.
        
             | adamtaylor_13 wrote:
             | Not if you understand how the wheel works. That's the whole
             | point.
        
           | jonplackett wrote:
           | But maybe do that on a smaller scale personal project?
        
           | catoc wrote:
           | Reinventing the wheel for Formula 1 driving...
        
             | dmoy wrote:
             | Depending on the wheel, maybe. Nowadays it's more
             | standardized - same rims for example. The tires are
             | standardized.
             | 
             | There's a lot less freedom in reinventing the wheel in
             | formula 1 nowadays
             | 
             | https://www.formula1-dictionary.net/wheels.html
             | 
             | The steering wheel of course isn't even a wheel anymore,
             | for a long time. It's some video game console / airplane
             | cockpit looking monstrosity.
        
           | samarthr1 wrote:
           | I funnily just read a whole Twitter thread that had this same
           | thesis, not 45 minutes ago... What a small world
        
           | atonse wrote:
           | Great to reinvent the wheel for your mom and pop blog, or to
           | teach yourself these concepts and try to break in. But not
           | for authn and authz for something official like this.
        
         | motorest wrote:
         | > Just use a framework to build your site. Don't reinvent the
         | wheel!
         | 
         | How do you arrive at that conclusion after reading an article
         | on how an API had a broken access control vulnerability?
        
           | renewiltord wrote:
           | He's being sarcastic and suggesting using some out of the box
           | rbac thing.
        
         | maxbond wrote:
         | There are some vulnerabilities frameworks can address wholesale
         | (like CSRF or XSS) as long as you keep to the blessed way of
         | doing things, but they aren't able to save you from a complete
         | failure to build authorization into your API. Like how
         | seatbelts save lives but can't stop you from accelerating
         | directly into a pole if you choose to do so.
        
         | zikani_03 wrote:
         | Mass assignment problems sometimes also come from (improper?)
         | use of frameworks. This goes beyond frameworks and more about
         | how thorough the testing and review of how the user account
         | modification and access control is done.
        
         | homakov wrote:
         | Github used a framework tho.
        
       | forgotaccount22 wrote:
       | Archaic company has archaic security. Well done on the RD, but
       | boy does it not surprise me one bit. Would almost be willing to
       | bet that the hash was MD5 too.
        
         | veqq wrote:
         | What hash do you use?
        
           | scq wrote:
           | bcrypt is the industry standard.
        
             | maxbond wrote:
             | `bcrypt` is probably the "standard" in the sense that it
             | has the widest adoption, but since 2015 [1] the "standard"
             | in terms of what you should recommend for new work has been
             | `argon2id` (and you can find parameter recommendations here
             | [2]).
             | 
             | [1]
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_Hashing_Competition
             | 
             | [2] https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Password
             | _Stor...
        
               | tom1337 wrote:
               | Also argon doesn't care about input length compared to
               | bcrypt which only ever compares the first 72 bytes of a
               | hash. Okta actually fell victim to this because they
               | concatenated userid + username + password. If userid +
               | password were over 72 bytes then the password would never
               | be checked thus you could login with userid + username.
               | 
               | https://trust.okta.com/security-advisories/okta-ad-ldap-
               | dele...
        
           | megous wrote:
           | yescrypt is very common these days, default in Debian
        
           | blitzar wrote:
           | im 1337 - I use plain text stored in a public s3 bucket
        
         | zozbot234 wrote:
         | It's an F1 racing site, their job is literally to move fast and
         | break things. https://xkcd.com/1428/
        
           | olyjohn wrote:
           | You break things in F1, you lose. Reliability and consistency
           | is key.
        
             | alt227 wrote:
             | Apart from the many many times where a teams R&D department
             | has come up with a radical new idea for a machine part
             | which gives them an advantage, and then all the other teams
             | copy it making it the new standard. This is how F1 has
             | evolved forever, by taking risks and experimenting. Not by
             | reliability and consistency!
        
             | zigman1 wrote:
             | It seems like this, but it actually not true. What's
             | interesting in F1 is that you have to find the right
             | balance between innovation and consistency.
             | 
             | James Vowles, current Williams TP ordered his team to
             | "break everything" in order to improve and change:
             | https://youtu.be/nYzwvTSffiY?t=3129
             | 
             | What is often forgotten is, that all F1 cars are
             | prototypes, they NEED to constantly change and innovate,
             | and every year it starts from the beginning (almost).
             | 
             | There is a fantastic book called Total Competition, which
             | is a conversation between two ex-team principles, one of
             | them Ross Brawn, probably most successful F1 engineer. In
             | it, Brawn says: "But where I think Formula One is very
             | strong is in the culture. If you wanted to develop a
             | concept and to drive things forward at maximum pace,
             | utilize it in Formula One. The composite companies love
             | Formula One because we are willing to try things. If
             | they've got a new resin system or a new type of fibre, they
             | give it to the Formula One teams to explore for them, to
             | look at the applications and come back with the feedback.
             | If they put it in the aerospace industry, five years later
             | they would have an answer. Put it into Formula One and five
             | months later they have got an answer"
        
           | mikey_p wrote:
           | No, this is the FIA[1], not Formula 1. They are very very
           | different organizations.
           | 
           | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9d%C3%A9ration_Intern
           | ati... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_Group
        
       | LorenDB wrote:
       | Ian, it would be great to see an RSS feed on your website if you
       | want to gain another regular reader :)
        
         | galnagli wrote:
         | Ian is a great writer
        
         | heavyset_go wrote:
         | Seconding this
        
       | jacquesm wrote:
       | That's not just one vulnerability, that's a whole slew of
       | failures. For instance there is absolutely no need to keep those
       | documents on the live server for applicants once they have been
       | used for their intended purpose. Blast radius reduction and all
       | that.
       | 
       | I hope you got at least free tickets for life out of this.
        
         | skeezyjefferson wrote:
         | > For instance there is absolutely no need to keep those
         | documents on the live server for applicants once they have been
         | used for their intended purpose. Blast radius reduction and all
         | that.
         | 
         | I hate this kind of post-hoc finger pointing people do after
         | security breaches. There are other concerns in life beyond
         | security - youre naive to think differently. Is your house
         | secure or could somebody break past your protections? Have you
         | harmed your defensive posture with negligence of security? Do
         | you even care?
        
           | zamadatix wrote:
           | I hope you never handle other people's PII with that
           | attitude. It should well and beyond be treated more securely
           | by a company collecting it than some random person's house or
           | individual set up, there are laws about this.
        
           | margalabargala wrote:
           | That's what you choose for yourself.
           | 
           | How do you feel if that's also what your bank chooses for
           | you?
        
           | jacquesm wrote:
           | I get told at least a couple of times every month that
           | security and business continuity are a complete waste of time
           | for your average company. So this isn't post-hoc, it is more
           | like 'the dumb fucks don't even practice the basics and they
           | could - and should - have known better'.
        
           | sebasvisser wrote:
           | Sure, hate on the person pointing at the fire instead of the
           | people holding the matches.
           | 
           | If you aren't prepared to face criticism after a failure, you
           | shouldn't participate in a professional environment. Without
           | people pointing out where it went wrong you'll never j ow
           | what to improve upon. Because if you knew, and chose not to
           | act..now that would be a whole new level of incompetence.
        
           | zalusio wrote:
           | Security has to be the #1 priority in computing, unlike your
           | house which probably doesn't need to be fortified like a
           | prison. The reason is that unlike your house, a computer
           | system is exposed to 8 billion people at all times, and maybe
           | 7 billion of them will face no consequences if they break in
           | and steal your stuff.
        
       | awesome_dude wrote:
       | Rule 1.
       | 
       | NEVER trust user supplied data.
       | 
       | Once that rule was broken, any other rules broken became clear to
       | everyone
        
         | jacquesm wrote:
         | You'd think that client side security would be something that
         | we'd gotten over by now.
        
           | rpcope1 wrote:
           | You'd think but I keep meeting even "experienced" technical
           | leadership that have been at this for a while that there's no
           | way to get around validation and security that's implemented
           | in client code.
        
             | cheschire wrote:
             | I've used browser dev tools to regularly add additional
             | drop down options to menus that weren't present. Huel, for
             | example, only offered 2 or 4 week subscriptions, so I added
             | 3 weeks to it because that's the frequency I needed, and it
             | worked no problem. 3 weeks later my shakes arrived and
             | every 3 weeks since.
        
               | umanwizard wrote:
               | That's incredible
        
               | mulmen wrote:
               | Did you try adjusting price?
        
               | achairapart wrote:
               | A kid in Hungary was arrested for exactly this (and it
               | was a cheap bus ticket): https://www.bitdefender.com/en-
               | us/blog/hotforsecurity/budape...
        
               | umanwizard wrote:
               | It doesn't seem crazy to me that someone should be
               | arrested for that! It's stealing. If someone came in my
               | house and stole my property I'd expect them to be
               | arrested, even if I had stupidly left the door wide open.
        
               | Nextgrid wrote:
               | According to the article the system was developed by a
               | regional subsidiary of a German mobile telco, which
               | already tells you everything you need to know about its
               | quality, but on top of that it was rushed to launch in
               | time for some sporting event and thus even less testing
               | was done that would normally happen.
               | 
               | Here's a better article:
               | https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/hungarian-hacker-
               | arrested-... - it seems like this was good faith security
               | research (he disclosed the issue after testing it) and he
               | couldn't use the transport pass he "stole" because he
               | didn't even live in their service area anyway.
               | 
               | This arrest had nothing to do with stealing and all to do
               | with putting well-connected, incompetent people in a very
               | uncomfortable position.
        
               | jacquesm wrote:
               | Why are you on HN?
               | 
               | A _kid_ showed up a bunch of big names. That 's the
               | equivalent of a kid walking into a bank and somehow
               | making it into the vault, alerting security to the fact
               | that it's possible without actually making off with all
               | of the gold. That's on the bank, not on the kid. Nobody
               | came into your house or stole your property. If they had
               | the police likely wouldn't show up, nor would the case
               | make the newspaper even if - hah, as if that happens -
               | they made an arrest.
               | 
               | The only reason you are hearing about this is because
               | someone at 'bigcorp' didn't want to accept responsibility
               | for their fuckups, and so they used the law to come down
               | on some kid which effectively did them a service, which
               | costs society a large pile of money, further
               | externalizing the cost of their fuckup.
        
               | motorest wrote:
               | > A kid showed up a bunch of big names.
               | 
               | The kid purposely changed the price of a service to lower
               | it to an insignificant fraction (reportedly from ~27PS to
               | ~0.15PS).
               | 
               | If that same kid went around a supermarket replacing
               | price tags to lower the selling price, would you call it
               | "showing up a bunch of big names"?
               | 
               | Say what you may about how broken and buggy the system
               | was. Purposely misusing it for financial advantage is
               | still a no-no.
        
               | detaro wrote:
               | Did the kid go around changing price tags, or did they
               | just show that it was possible?
        
               | jacquesm wrote:
               | How do you propose he would have been able to establish
               | that this was indeed a vulnerability?
        
               | motorest wrote:
               | > How do you propose he would have been able to establish
               | that this was indeed a vulnerability?
               | 
               | I could comment extensively on the issue, as it is not as
               | cut and dry as you imply. Instead, I'm going to link to
               | the HM discussion from 2017 , as I think it is insightful
               | and covers nuances.
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835515
        
               | achairapart wrote:
               | Come on, a kid was just fooling around with the developer
               | console and probably had a curiosity just like the
               | comment above:
               | 
               | > Did you try adjusting price?
               | 
               | And he was punished for "hacking", not for stealing, and
               | for indirectly putting to shame who was responsible for
               | the epic fail.
        
               | motorest wrote:
               | > Come on, a kid was just fooling around with the
               | developer console and probably had a curiosity just like
               | the comment above
               | 
               | You're failing to address the point. It is also trivial
               | to switch price tags in supermarkets. If a kid rips off
               | the tag of an expensive product, tacks on another price
               | tag for pennies, and proceeds to pay the reported price
               | at the checkout counter, is this something deemed
               | acceptable or even classified as vulnerability research?
               | 
               | Make no mistake: the system was a shit show and all
               | companies involved pulled some "sociopath mid-level
               | manager saving his ass" moves. But the issue is nuanced.
        
               | achairapart wrote:
               | There was no personal profit. He bought a ticket he never
               | used, just to show to people on twitter how bad the
               | system was. He could have silently taken advantage of his
               | discovery and travel at no cost for a long time peraphs.
               | But no.
               | 
               | Sounds more like vulnerability reasearch than crime to
               | me.
        
               | sgarland wrote:
               | IANAL, and furthermore have no idea what Hungary's legal
               | system is like, but mens rea is a thing. If I break a
               | window by using it as a target for practicing my golf
               | swing (I don't golf; I have no idea if this is something
               | golfers do) I am culpable. If I break a window because
               | I'm trying to land balls next to the window, I _might_ be
               | culpable. Again, IANAL, so if anyone wants to correct my
               | analogy, please do.
        
               | daseiner1 wrote:
               | if the kid could successfully modify the scanned value of
               | physical barcodes a) that would be quite the feat and b)
               | that would absolutely be showing up a bunch of big names
        
               | rafram wrote:
               | It wouldn't be quite the feat at all. Barcodes for pre-
               | priced items sold by weight (cheese, meat, etc.) encode
               | the price in the last four digits. Replacing those would
               | be trivial.
        
               | giobox wrote:
               | This attack has been done trivially for years - you just
               | sticker over the barcode with the barcode of a cheaper
               | item in the store. If you plan to use self-service
               | checkouts for this scam, pick cheaper item with same
               | weight or with a tag that prices cheaply per unit of
               | weight (produce) etc.
        
               | spockz wrote:
               | How did the arrest go? For all you know it was the local
               | cop that took him to the station and put him under
               | arrest. Not to necessarily punish but to imprint that
               | even though the action was minimally invasive for a
               | simple bus ticket, it applied on larger systems, could
               | have a significant effect. So more as a simple friendly
               | deterrent rather than arrest and spent some nights in
               | jail.
        
               | abustamam wrote:
               | I don't think you can call any sort of arrest a simple
               | friendly deterrent, or intended not to punish. That
               | shit's traumatizing. Should he have done that? Probably
               | not. But did he deserve arrest for finding a
               | vulnerability? This could have been a conversation that
               | didn't involve police. The kid could have helped them
               | improve their systems instead of spending taxpayer
               | dollars to send cops to the kid to arrest him.
        
               | umanwizard wrote:
               | > without actually making off with all of the gold
               | 
               | This is the key difference. The comment I was replying to
               | implied that the transaction was actually completed, or
               | at least I thought it did.
               | 
               | If the guy[0] didn't indeed actually benefit from the
               | vulnerability then that is a very different story, and I
               | don't think he should be arrested in that case.
               | 
               | 0: not "kid" -- he is 18 which I assume is above the age
               | of criminal responsibility in Hungary.
        
               | detaro wrote:
               | It's more that they walked by, saw your door open, popped
               | their head in and then called for you to make sure you
               | knew the door was open.
        
               | wqaatwt wrote:
               | No. It's if you were selling something in your house for
               | $10. Somebody came in, crossed out the number on the tag,
               | wrote down $1 and handed you a bill.
               | 
               | Then you took their money and gave them the item without
               | saying anything.
               | 
               | Would seem like a weird situation but I don't see how its
               | theft.
        
               | LudwigNagasena wrote:
               | I bet that would be most likely classified as shoplifting
               | and/or fraud depending on jurisdiction.
        
               | wqaatwt wrote:
               | Or a form of negotiation if done in plain sight.
        
               | cheschire wrote:
               | I am not malicious or willing to attempt theft.
               | Academically though, in an official testing environment,
               | that would be entertaining to attempt.
        
               | mulmen wrote:
               | Yeah I'm not _suggesting_ that you adjust the price, just
               | curious if they were passing price through the client as
               | well.
        
               | Zekio wrote:
               | you can do this on surprisingly many websites, where they
               | include the price in the url they redirect you to, when
               | going to the payment provider, and even then often it is
               | only protected by an md5 hash if it is verified
        
               | esseph wrote:
               | I love this so much
        
               | codethief wrote:
               | I did something similar on an airline website earlier
               | this year: I wanted to change the date of my return
               | flight and also make it an open jaw (i.e. leave from a
               | different airport than where I had arrived). Changing my
               | flights was included in my original fare, modulo the fare
               | difference. Unfortunately, on their website the input
               | text field for the airport I would be flying out from
               | would get disabled a second or two into loading the
               | "alternative flights search" page, and wouldn't allow me
               | to make it an open jaw. So I fired up my browser dev
               | tools and changed the value of the text field to the
               | desired airport code. Suddenly, I was finding the flights
               | I had been looking for - as it turns out, at no
               | additional charge whatsoever.
        
               | jacquesm wrote:
               | What's insane is that there are countries where this is
               | considered hacking, even if all you do is change the URL.
               | 
               | somefile-small.jpg -> somefile.jpg
        
               | abustamam wrote:
               | Black hat hacking or white hat hacking? Genuinely curious
               | because a lot of these security write-ups can't happen
               | without "hacking." which may explain why we don't get
               | these security write-ups from folks in those countries.
        
               | anal_reactor wrote:
               | My insurance company has different frontend password
               | regex on registration page and on login page. My password
               | passed the registration regex but fails the login regex.
               | In order to log in, I need to manually remove the
               | frontend-side password regex check.
        
               | abustamam wrote:
               | This absolutely boggles my mind. My last insurance
               | company let me create a 20 character PW but limited the
               | password field on the login screen to 16 chars. I didn't
               | think to futz around with the code so I just recreated a
               | less secure password. I suspect many other less technical
               | people either did that too or just called support.
               | 
               | There is zero excuse for that though. 16 chars is just
               | way too short for a proper secure pass phrase, but at
               | least make it consistent with password creation!
        
               | encom wrote:
               | Ever since I started using a password manager (a long
               | time ago), I have encountered SO MANY password bugs. But
               | one of the most frustrating issues, is when a website
               | asks you to create a password, but does not tell you what
               | length or characters are accepted. So you have to dumb
               | down Keepass incrementally until it passes. A tedious
               | game.
               | 
               | If your software doesn't accept this password, please
               | change career immediately:
               | 
               | u"<17(r)fIa0A1n:1}Ao>>e:t]iw'3/4a\B2,AEth(r)M3_o>$1/4ya/m
               | H|n%?6nE$l#DhqIPS<<{'O"V^c4u
        
               | ewoodrich wrote:
               | Variant of this I've hit is the phone number validation
               | rules at signup differs from the actual API call to send
               | 2FA texts (or was changed between the time of original
               | signup and login attempt) so I create an account
               | successfully with a Google Voice number and then when I
               | actually need to receive 2FA the message goes into the
               | aether with no error surfaced at any point.
        
               | sgarland wrote:
               | Somewhere, there is a table with a `frequency` column,
               | storing client-supplied values, and an application
               | happily accepting them as-is.
               | 
               | This is why you normalize your tables and use FK
               | Constraints - you aren't going to catch all the edge
               | cases in code. Let the DB be the final arbiter of
               | validity, because it's been tested to hell and back.
               | 
               | Re: Huel, that's pretty smart. My rate of consumption is
               | fairly consistent (usually 1x/day on weekdays), but
               | occasionally I'll have one on the weekend, so the given
               | cadences worked for me. I do 2x 12-pack / 4 weeks to hit
               | the free shipping tier.
        
           | hulitu wrote:
           | > You'd think that client side security would be something
           | that we'd gotten over by now.
           | 
           | Well, we have passkeys. /s
        
         | nradov wrote:
         | Never trust any data. Even if the data comes from a partner or
         | internal system it could be compromised or defective.
        
           | logicallee wrote:
           | >Never trust any data. Even if the data comes from a partner
           | or internal system it could be compromised or defective.
           | 
           | I don't even call it data anymore. I call it dat _ain 't_.
        
         | coldpie wrote:
         | Rule 0: Any networked computer should be considered semi-
         | public. Don't store any information you do not want to be
         | public, or give access to controls that you do not want to be
         | publicly accessible, on a networked computer. There are simply
         | too many vulnerabilities to assume otherwise.
        
           | normie3000 wrote:
           | I doubt there are many people in rich countries that follow
           | this rule, given that smartphones are networked computers and
           | people don't want their personal photos to he publicly
           | accessible.
        
             | coldpie wrote:
             | > I doubt there are many people in rich countries that
             | follow this rule
             | 
             | I agree, there definitely are many people who don't follow
             | the rule! And so we get things like this, https://en.wikipe
             | dia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak
        
       | paddleon wrote:
       | missed opportunity to grant the authors a F1 super license and
       | get the chance to actually drive one of the cars!
        
         | stingrae wrote:
         | If only that's all it takes
        
       | CSDude wrote:
       | Imagine being a world class F1 driver and (someone) still have to
       | upload your CV somewhere.
        
         | ddalex wrote:
         | a couple of weeks ago Verstappen raced in a "Advanced-amateur"
         | competition in Germany - he had to be "trained" by an official
         | instructor in a restricted car because he hadn't raced there
         | before
         | 
         | I imagine the instructor "What could I teach Verstappen now..."
        
       | yieldcrv wrote:
       | responsible disclosure made you no money and even after that
       | blogpost you still have to take the l33tcode interview
        
       | Briannaj wrote:
       | my favorite type of hacking. reading the js an modifying the PUT.
       | Works a lot more often than you expect.
        
       | Aeolun wrote:
       | They took the website offline on the same day it was reported!
       | That's amazing!
        
         | ehnto wrote:
         | Yeah I thought that was good. The fix wasn't that long either
         | given how fast enterprises like this usually operate.
        
           | Jeremy1026 wrote:
           | I wonder how much the FIA being European affected the
           | response. Would they have been as quick to react if they were
           | American and knew they'd only be facing a relatively small
           | class-action settlement?
        
       | olliebrkr wrote:
       | HAX HAX HAX SUPERHAX HAX HAX (sorry)
        
         | timpattinson wrote:
         | du du du du..... hax verstappen
        
       | braza wrote:
       | In 2025 I think most of the PII is just a legal liability for 99%
       | of the cases.
       | 
       | I once saw a custom service where you could connect your data,
       | like Mixpanel or some analytics, and the whole motto was that
       | this service did not want any of your PII data, and even the
       | employees and companies that could access all the anonymous data
       | had pseudonyms (e.g., a company named "Ocean's Eleven" with the
       | employees Billy, Reuben, Rusty, Benedict, Linus, Basher, and so
       | on).
       | 
       | Does someone know any architectures or designs of applications
       | (books or references) that take anonymity as default?
        
       | t1234s wrote:
       | Is this a case where the back end has no whitelisting of what
       | fields are allowed to be written to for that specific endpoint?
        
       | encom wrote:
       | Missed opportunity to delete Lance Stroll's license.
        
       | homakov wrote:
       | >The JSON HTTP response for updating our own profile contained
       | the "roles" parameter, something that might allow us to escalate
       | privileges if the PUT request was vulnerable to mass assignment.
       | We began looking through the JavaScript for any logic related to
       | this parameter.
       | 
       | Oh, here we go again. JavaScript brings mass assignment back. My
       | efforts went in vein. Strong params, pls!
        
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