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Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

>If you give us reasonable time to respond to your report before making any information public, AND MAKE A GOOD FAITH EFFORT TO AVOID PRIVACY VIOLATIONS, destruction of data, and interruption or degradation of our service during your research, we will not bring any lawsuit against you or ask law enforcement to investigate you.

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I certainly wouldn't consider dumping credentials to test for reuse/continued use a privacy violation. If FB wants people not to dump data, they need to make that explicit and specific.

Really? The article states: "To say that I had gained access to basically all of Instagram's secret key material would probably be a fair statement". How on earth would holding on to that data not be a privacy violation?

Holding credentials is not violating privacy. It would be possible to use those credentials to violate privacy, but merely having them is not that act.

Holding sensitive credentials is absolutely a violation of privacy. This is like saying that having a user's password is not a privacy violation unless you use it to gain access to their account.

So would you agree that holding the keys to someone's house is also a privacy violation? What if instead of keys, you were holding a set of lockpicks? Would everyone's privacy of home be immediately violated?

It's all a question of intent. If you keep the lockpicks so that you can pick locks, then yes. If you're a lockpick collector, then no.

I understood it was employee credentials, not customer.

Holding a manually chosen password can be a privacy violation because it's a small peek into the user's psyche. (I wouldn't say the employee "changeme", "instagram" etc. passwords count, although the act of running a password cracking tool meant that he could have seen a more personal password.)

Holding some randomly generated numbers that could be used to access a server is not.

Surely they would have to revoke all the keys anyway as they would have no idea if a blackhat got their first and took the keys before the vulnerability was reported?

According to the timeline, Instagram have known about the ssl keys since 1 Dec.

My browser is currently showing an ssl cert for instagram.com that was issued in April and expires on Dec 31.

Doesn't look like they're in any hurry to revoke that one. (I guess like Alex Stamos told his employer - it's "trivial and of little value"...)

Or, like almost any company that's reasonably competent, they have multiple certificates with different private keys.

And they just happen to only leave some of them in their S3 buckets?

Seems … contradictory.

Whose privacy did Wes violate? Do webservers have data personal to them?

Privacy in this case is in an infosec context. Not a personal information context. Finding the open/unsecured/unpatched server is a bug. Downloading and testing a password keyring found as a result of that bug is not finding a bug. That is exploiting a bug for additional gain.

Finding a sql injection in a query string is finding a bug. Is using the injection to dump a table exploiting the bug for additional gain?

It sounds like you're only allowed to penetrate one layer of a defence in depth system. If you gain access to some edge system that isn't sensitive, I'd assume that would pay little. If you gain access to some core system, I'd assume that would pay lots. Why then are you not allowed to pivot from some nothing system to some larger system?

The purpose of bug bounties is to secure your systems. If you only ever secure the first layer, if some malicious actor finds another vector into the same system and there is a really easy pivot in sight (like full access to an S3 account!) then you've lost. If the bug bounty hunter found the escalation though and responsibly reported that, then a potential second vector loses its potency.

I'm not a security person at all so I'd like to hear some perspective on my thoughts above. It just seems fairly short sighted to specifically forbid pivoting.

FWIW dumping S3 buckets as a white hat does seem wrong to me. Listing them probably ok.

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