> I would start testing every website I'd visit for vulbs
That's a pretty bad idea if you don't have permission from the owners of the site.
That's a pretty bad idea if you don't have permission from the owners of the site.
Yes, there is a reason why bounty programs exist, they make it plain that testing is 'ok'. In absence of a bounty program or a relationship with the company you can't claim that you 'don't mean harm' and that your tests would never break the software or the network. It's going to be lumped in with actual attacks.
But that's criminal law. That's a real concern, but the bigger concern is tort law. If you blow up someone's site by getting an XSS input cached and replayed to all its users (or, heck, even if you just cause an alarm that they have spend money responding to), you are going to be liable.
All the sudden every user on the site is getting alert popups.
A lot of these sites can calculate down to the second and the dollar how much they lose if their site goes down. Guess who's liable if the cause of that downtime is you?
I've found a disturbing number of SQL injection and XSS attacks like this, just messing around on obscure sites.
I run a small business and have noticed our customers try to do the same sometimes, their user ID is visible in the URL at some points. I see the error logs saying they tried to load something they didn't have permission for at least a few times a month.
Do you think there's a serious legal risk here, assuming I don't perform any bad queries on the DB but just see an error message from it and assuming I don't give anyone an XSS'd link, just from plain toying with URLs?