Believe it or not a lot of hacking is more like this than you think.
Social engineering is probably 95% of modern attack vectors. And that’s not even unexpected, some highly regarded computer scientists and security researchers concluded this more than a decade ago.
When the technical side reaches a certain level of security, the humans become the weakest link.
*if
We reached that part a long time ago.
Clearly the authors of this app did not. Hence “if.”
Humans were still very much the weak link here. The tools to do this even mildly securely are available, well documented, and honestly, cheap af
I work in security and I kinda doubt this. There are plenty of issues just like what is outlined here that would be much easier to exploit than social engineering. Social engineering costs a lot more than
GET /secrets.json.There is good reason to be concerned about both, but 95% sounds way off and makes it sound like companies should allocate significantly more time to defend against social engineering, when they should first try to ensure social engineering is the easiest way to exploit their system. I can tell you from about a decade of experience that it typically isn’t.
https://www.infosecinstitute.com/resources/security-awareness/human-error-responsible-data-breaches/
You’re right. It’s 74%.
https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/clorox-380-million-suit-cognizant-cyberattack/753837/
It’s way easier to convince someone that you are just a lost user who needs access than it is to try to probe an organization’s IT security from the outside.
This is only going to get worse with the ability to replicate other’s voices and images. People already consistently fall for text message and email social engineering. Now someone just needs to build a model off a CSO doing interviews for a few hours and then call their phone explaining there has been a breach. Sure, 80% of good tech professionals won’t fall for it, but the other 20% that just got hired out of their league and are fearing for their jobs will immediately do what they are told, especially if the breach is elaborate enough to convince them it’s an internal security thing.
Yes social engineering can be incredibly effective. I completely agree, but there is a bit of an obsession with it these days and imo it’s over indexed, because at the end of the day the type of social engineering detailed in that report typically just provides access.
In some cases, the target is important enough and has enough organizational power that accessing the network as them is sufficient, but that’s not often the case. What that means is that in those other cases social engineering (which in that report you cited is often just phishing) is providing, typically, internal network access. An attacker will have to move through the network and exploit software typically to continue their attack. There are many points in this chain that the weakness lies in software or configuration. If effort was placed on making those systems better it would likely see better results than hyper focusing on the social engineering, which is significantly more difficult to stop, especially with all of the things you mentioned on the horizon.
My point is then that even if it is a part of 74% of breaches, according to Verizon, it’s not necessarily sufficient and is often paired with software level exploits.
And I know this because my company does plenty of red teaming, and we use social engineering but at the end of the day the more interesting result comes from a software exploit or just abusing a weak configuration.
You are right and what some people miss is that social engineering being the vector to gain foothold doesn’t mean that it was sufficient to allow the breach. Almost always you need some other weakness (or a series of them). Except when the weaknesses are so had that you don’t need a foothold at all (like this case), or when the social engineering gives you everything (rare, but you might convince you someone to give you access to data etc.).
A whole separate conversation is deserved by how effective (or not) social engineering training is. Quite a few good papers about the topic came out in the last fee years.
This has been the case for 40+ years. Humans are almost always the weakest link.
we built this shit. thus we are always to blame.
The percentage is closer to 75% than 95%.
Many years ago, I discovered that my then-employer’s “home built” e-commerce system had all user and admin passwords displayed in plaintext at home/admin/passwords.
When I brought this to the attention of leadership, they called the “developer” in and he said “oh, well, that’s IP locked, so no one on the web can access it!” When I pulled it up on my phone, he insisted my phone was on the work WiFi, despite it being clearly verifiable that was not the case. (The same work WiFi that had an open public connection, which is the one my phone would have been on, if it were on it…)
He did fix that, but many other issues remained. Eventually a new COO hired someone competent as his ‘backup’, replaced our website and finally suggested he pursue other employment opportunities before he could no longer voluntarily pursue them. (There was concern he might sabotage.)
I think that’s less about “hacking” and more about modern day devs being overworked by their hot-shit team lead and clueless PMs and creating “temporary” solutions that become permanent in the long run.
This bucket was probably something they set up early in the dev cycle so they could iterate components without needing to implement an auth system first and then got rushed into releasing before it could be fixed. That’s almost always how this stuff happens; whether it’s a core element or a rushed DR test.
modern day devs being overworked
And then there is meningspunktet.dk which had all the time in the world to do whatever they wanted, and even get their hosting paid for by a university. They still leaked everyones email, phone, full legal name and location on day one and only fixed it because I pointed it out.
Thanks for the writeup - I can’t believe they claimed anything about keeping data safe while building the website so poorly…
Shodan lists 100’000s of publicly accessible security cameras.
If I was a hacker, I would just get a job as a night cleaning person at corporate office buildings. And then just help myself to the fucking post-it notes with usernames and passwords on them.
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Security by obscurity.
AI just enables the shit programmers to create a greater volume of shit
I’ll tape this to my office door.
My favorite one I’ve seen so far was “AI can take a junior programmer and make them a 10x junior programmer.”
This reminds me of how I showed a friend and her company how to get databases from BLS and it’s basically all just text files with urls. “What API did you call? How did you scrape the data?”
Nah man, it’s just… there. As government data should be. They called it a hack.
ah yes, the forbidden curl hack
When getting data legitimately is beyond them…
I remember when a senior developer where i worked was tired of connecting to the servers to check its configuration, so they added a public facing rest endpoint that just dumped the entire active config, including credentials and secrets
That was a smaller slip-up than exposing a database like that (he just forgot that the config contained secrets) but still funny that it happened
That’s not a “senior developer.” That’s a developer that has just been around for too long.
Secrets shouldn’t be in configurations, and developers shouldn’t be mucking around in production, nor with production data.
Yeah the whole config thing in that project was an eldritch horror of a legacy, too ingrained in both the services and tooling to be modified without massive rewrites
That’s just a senile developer
I would have put IP address access restrictions on that at the very least. I may have even done something like that more than once for various tools in the past.
That way it acts completely open to people (or other servers) in the right places and denies all knowledge to anything else.
Peak Vibe Coding results.
while True:
Jesus Christ
There’s nothing wrong with manually breaking a loop.
There’s nothing wrong with eating a banana with a knife and fork, either.
Except living with the shame.
Well these people probably don’t wash their hands so knife fork is the most sanitary way.
Most monkey-esque insult
An infinite loop used to be such a rank code smell back when I was a junior, specifically because I was a noob and made giant loops like 50 lines long and invariably didn’t plan the exit condition right, and then my computer would lock up and I would have to hard power cycle.
But yeah, now it’s it’s a totally acceptable little pattern imho.
eh
I absolutely despise Firebase Firestore (the database technology that was “hacked”). It’s like a clarion call for amateur developers, especially low rate/skill contractors who clearly picked it not as part of a considered tech stack, but merely as the simplest and most lax hammer out there. Clearly even DynamoDB with an API gateway is too scary for some professionals. It almost always interfaces directly with clients/the internet without sufficient security rules preventing access to private information (or entire database deletion), and no real forethought as to ongoing maintenance and technical debt.
A Firestore database facing the client directly on any serious project is a code smell in my opinion.
It’s like people learn how to make a phone app in React Native or whatever, but then come to the shocking and unpleasant realisation that a data-driven service isn’t just a shiny user interface - it needs a backend too.
But they don’t know anything about backend, and don’t want to, because as far as they are concerned all those pesky considerations like data architecture, availability, security, integrity etc are all just unwanted roadblocks on the path to launching their shiny app.
And so, when a service seemingly provides a way to build an app without needing to care about any of those things, of course they take it.
And I get it, I really do. The backend usually is the genuine hard part in any project, because it’s the part with all the risk. The part with all the problems. The place where everything can come crashing down or leak all your data if you make bad decisions. That’s the bothersome nature of data-driven services.
But that’s exactly why the backend is important, and especially the part you can’t build anything decent without thinking about.
I think it’s less about the tech picked and more about developers with no sense of security and a poor understanding of networking. I’ve seen far too many web applications where the developer needed some sort of database behind it (MySQL, PostGres, MSSQL) and so they stood up either a container or entire VM with a public IP and whatever the networking layer set to allow any IP to hit the database port. The excuse is almost always something like, “we needed the web front end to be able to reach the database, so we gave the database server/container a public IP and allowed access”. Which is wonderful, right up until half of the IP addresses in Russia start trying to brute force the database.
I agree that this is ultimately a problem with developers lacking security knowledge and general understanding, but my issue with Firestore specifically is that it is a powerful tool that, while it can be adopted as part of a carefully considered tech stack, lends itself most naturally towards being a blunt force instrument used by these kinds of developers.
My main criticism of Firestore is that it offers a powerful feature set that is both extremely attractive to amateur or constrained developers while simultaneously doing a poor job of guiding said amateurs towards creating a secure and well designed backend. In particular, the seemingly expected use case of the technology as something directly interfaced with by apps and other clients, as evidenced by the substantial support and feature set for this use case, is the main issue. This no-code no-management client driven interaction model makes it especially attractive to these developers.
This lack of indirection through an API Gateway or service, however, imposes additional design considerations largely delegated to the security rules which can easily be missed by a beginner. For example:
- Many examples of amateurs take an open-by-default approach, only applying access and write restrictions where necessary and miss data that should be restricted
- Some amateurs deploy databases with no access or write restrictions at all
- There is no way to only allow a “view” of a document to a request, instead a separate document and security rules containing the private fields needs to be created. This can be fairly simple to design around but seems to be a bit of a “gotcha”, plus if you have similar but non identical sets of data that needs to be accessible by different groups it must be duplicated and manually synchronized.
- Since there is no way to version data models, incompatible changes require complicated workarounds or an increasingly complicated deserialization process on the client side (especially as existing clients continue to write outdated models).
- Schema validation of data written by clients to the database is handled by security rules, which is seemingly unintuitive or missed by many developers because I’ve seen plenty of projects miss it
- If clients are writing data directly, it can become fairly complex to handle and subsequently maintain their contributions, especially if the aforementioned private data documents are required or the data model changes.
All of these pitfalls can be worked around (although I would still argue for some layer of indirection at least for writes), but at this point I’ve been contracted to 2 or 3 projects worked on by “professionals” (derogatory) that failed to account for any of these issues and I absolutely sick to death of it. I think a measure of a tools quality is whether it guides a developer towards good practices by design and I have found Firestore to completely fail in that regard. I think it can be used well, and it is perfectly appropriate for small inconsequential (as in data leaks would be inconsequential) single developer projects, but it almost never is.
This is a very good writeup.
Do you think supabase or other similar solutions also have these pitfalls?
Ah yes, Firebase. The Google version of leaking all your company data through a public S3 bucket
I remember when they launched and started pushing it in the Android dev community. Actually won a Google Pixel at a Firebase sponsored hackathon in my town…after that I never touched Firestore again. Using that ACL language to restrict access, you could see the massive foot gun from a mile away
sounds like firebase itself is a hack.
I’m honestly embarrassed by my fellow devs more often than not these days.
What the fuck happened to craftsmanship? Or taking pride in your work?
oh right, techbro startup culture garbage ended it.
What was the BASE_URL here? I’m guessing that’s like a profile page or something?
So then you still first have to get a URL to each profile? Or is this like a feed URL?
It’s a public firebase bucket
Oh Jesus
🤦♂️
That should be criminally negligent.
Possibly from the decompiled APK. 404media reported that they found the same URL as the posted one in the APK (archive link).
I always get irrationally angry when i see python code using os.path instead of pathlib. What is this, the nineties?
Make a PR
Be the change you want to see in the world.
And what’s with the string addition? Never heard of f-strings or even .format()?
What big advantages does pathlib provide? os.path works just fine
- Everything is in one library which offers consistency for all operations.
- You can use forward slashes on Windows paths, which makes for much better readability.
- You can access all the parts of a pathlib object with attributes like .stem, .suffix or .parent.
- You can easily find the differences between paths with .relative_to()
- You can easily build up complex paths with the / operator (no string additions).
Just off the top of my head.
if you don’t need those, why burden the program with another dependency?
It’s in the standard library, just like os or shutil.
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who’d have thought that javascript and client side programming was incredibly susceptible to security flaws and deeply unsafe
As much as I dislike JavaScript, it isn’t responsible for this. The person (or AI) and their stupidity is.
When i tried making a website with gemini cli it did deadass use string interpolation for sql queries so everything is possible
Robert’); DROP TABLE Students; –
aw bobby
but it didn’t help; it was basically the gasoline
In what way?
who’d have thought that being shitty programmer was incredibly susceptible to security flaws and deeply unsafe instead of javascript
No, it must be JavaScript that is the problem
principal_skinner.jpg.exe
Microsoft defender identified a malware in this executable.
Wow. It actually identified something?
It’s good enough for corporate (with multiple other lines of defense).
Even the best models fine tuned for coding still have training that was based on both good and bad examples of programming from humans. And since it’s not AGI but using probability to generate the code, you’re going to get crap programming logic dependent on how often such things were used and suggested by humans to other humans. Googling for an answer on how to code something pulls up all sorts of answers from many sources, but reading through them, many are terrible. An LLM doesn’t know that, it just knows that humans liked some answers better than others, so GIGO.
What is the Tea hack?
An app called Tea™ was marketed as a safespace for women and used government issued IDs as a way to verify users.
4Chan users leaked all of the IDs onto the larger internet.
Wow what a fuckin shitshow. I have so many follow-up questions
So it essentially became a honey trap, either through malice or sheer incompetence.
Well, I get what you mean, but a “honey trap” idiom in English, also called a “honeypot scheme”, usually refers to utilizing romantic connections to influence people to make decisions or release confidential information.
Honeypot is a common term in computing/cybersecurity, setting up fake important servers so bad actors invade and the security team can analyze what got in and how to deal with it.
Well it doesnt surprise me that the IT team doesn’t know about a sexual terminology, tbh.
They’re all over master-slave, tho 😏
At this point I think the women using it got psyopped
These people should serve jail time. I’m not kidding.
I’m no lawyer, but this seems like at least grounds for a class action lawsuit, I would think. Like, it seems like privacy and security is implied (however ironic for an app like this) when requiring users to upload their PII.
Also, I assume their privacy policy didn’t mention that they were just gonna publish their users’ PII.
You could say they “spilled the tea”.
I wonder if their data is poisoned by below average Dev. I mean if your test subjects are met or below Dev and mad Ethel lost 20% efficiency imagine what you can do to good dev
Not below average dev necessarily, but when posting code examples on the internet people often try to get a point across. Like how do I solve X? Here is code that solves X perfectly, the rest of the code is total crap, ignore that and focus on the X part. Because it’s just an example, it doesn’t really matter. But when it’s used to train an LLM it’s all just code. It doesn’t know which parts are important and which aren’t.
And this becomes worse when small little bits of code are included in things like tutorials. That means it’s copy pasted all over the place, on forums, social media, stackoverflow etc. So it’s weighted way more heavily. And the part where the tutorial said: “Warning, this code is really bad and insecure, it’s just an example to show this one thing” gets lost in the shuffle.
Same thing when an often used pattern when using a framework gets replaced by new code where the framework does a little bit more so the same pattern isn’t needed anymore. The LLM will just continue with the old pattern, even though there’s often a good reason it got replaced (for example security issues). And if the new and old version aren’t compatible with each other, you are in for a world of hurt trying to use an LLM.
And now with AI slop flooding all of these places where they used to get their data, it just becomes worse and worse.
These are just some of the issues why using an LLM for coding is probably a really bad idea.
Yeah, once you get the LLM’s response you still have to go to the documentation to check whether it’s telling the truth and the APIs it recommends are current. You’re no better off than if you did an internet search and tried to figure out who’s giving good advice, or just fumbled your own way through the docs in the first place.
whether it’s telling the truth
“whether the output is correct or a mishmash”
“Truth” implies understanding that these don’t have, and because of the underlying method the models use to generate plausible-looking responses based on training data, there is no “truth” or “lying” because they don’t actually “know” any of it.
I know this comes off probably as super pedantic, and it definitely is at least a little pedantic, but the anthropomorphism shown towards these things is half the reason they’re trusted.
That and how much ChatGPT flatters people.
Yeah, it has no notion of being truthful. But we do, so I was bringing in a human perspective there. We know what it says may be true or false, and it’s natural for us to call the former “telling the truth”, but as you say we need to be careful not to impute to the LLM any intention to tell the truth, any awareness of telling the truth, or any intention or awareness at all. All it’s doing is math that spits out words according to patterns in the training material.
I figured and I know it’s shorthand, it’s my own frustration that said shorthand has partly enabled the anthropomorphism that it’s enjoyed.
Leave the anthropomorphism to pets, plants, and furries, basically. And cars. It’s okay to call cars like that. They know what they did.
Didn’t expect this much. I don’t think about tuto example being weighted heavier. This make sense.
