by bgbntty2 | 2025-12-03 21:52:59+00:00
I'm a bit conflicted about what responsible disclosure should be, but in many cases it seems like these conditions hold:

1) the hack is straightforward to do;

2) it can do a lot of damage (get PII or other confidential info in most cases);

3) downtime of the service wouldn't hurt anyone, especially if we compare it to the risk of the damage.

But, instead of insisting on the immediate shutting down of the affected service, we give companies weeks or months to fix the issue while notifying no one in the process and continuing with business as usual.

I've submitted 3 very easy exploits to 3 different companies the past year and, thankfully, they fixed them in about a week every time. Yet, the exploits were trivial (as I'm not good enough to find the hard ones, I admit). Mostly IDORs, like changing id=123456 to id=1 all the way up to id=123455 and seeing a lot medical data that doesn't belong to me. All 3 cases were medical labs because I had to have some tests done and wanted to see how secure my data was.

Sadly, in all 3 cases I had to send a follow-up e-mail after ~1 week, saying that I'll make the exploit public if they don't fix it ASAP. What happened was, again, in all 3 cases, the exploit was fixed within 1-2 days.

If I'd given them a month, I feel they would've fixed the issue after a month. If I'd given then a year - after a year.

And it's not like there aren't 10 different labs in my city. It's not like online access to results is critical, either. You can get a printed result or call them to write them down. Yes, it would be tedious, but more secure.

So I should've said from the beginning something like:

> I found this trivial exploit that gives me access to medical data of thousands of people. If you don't want it public, shut down your online service until you fix it, because it's highly likely someone else figured it out before me. If you don't, I'll make it public and ruin your reputation.

Now, would I make it public if they don't fix it within a few days? Probably not, but I'm not sure. But shutting down their service until the fix is in seems important. If it was some hard-to-do hack chaining several exploits, including a 0-day, it would be likely that I'd be the first one to find it and it wouldn't be found for a while by someone else afterwards. But ID enumerations? Come on.

So does the standard "responsible disclosure", at least in the scenario I've given (easy to do; not critical if the service is shut down), help the affected parties (the customers) or the businesses? Why should I care about a company worth $X losing $Y if it's their fault?

I think in the future I'll anonymously contact companies with way more strict deadlines if their customers (or others) are in serious risk. I'll lose the ability to brag with my real name, but I can live with it.

As to the other comments talking about how spammed their security@ mail is - that's the cost of doing business. It doesn't seem like a valid excuse to me. Security isn't one of hundreds random things a business should care about. It's one of the most important ones. So just assign more people to review your mail. If you can't, why are you handling people's PII?