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Comment by leoqa | Hacker News Reader

A middle ground: announce that Discord is insecure and you’ve found a zero-day. Perhaps a trusted 3rd party exists that can attest publicly (Mitre?) after you show a demo.

Then customers are aware, Discord is pressured to act/shamed, and then you proceed with your private disclosure with a window.

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Yep. People keep pushing this false dichotomy that it's either company-directed 'responsible disclosure', or it's "release full working POC and complete writeup publicly, immediately", and there's no middle ground.

Yes, limited disclosure will make people start hunting for the vuln, but it's still more than enough time for me to revoke an API key, lock down an internet-facing service, turn off my Alexa (no, I don't/won't own one), uninstall the app, etc. And it's better than me not knowing, and someone is intruding into my system in the meantime.

Knowing a half-truth is as bad as knowing nothing. Half the time I will do useless mitigations because actually I would have been unaffected. The other half I will do the wrong thing because of incomplete reporting.

This is true of even disclosures with all information available.

I can't count how many people did incorrect or unnecessary fixes for log4shell, even months after it was disclosed.

> Knowing a half-truth is as bad as knowing nothing.

This is assuming the perfect user who even understands the bug and the full impact. Everyone is working with half-truths already, in which case by your logic they may as well know nothing.

That is useless, because of the tons of sleazy CVE-collectors. They will always announce the next heartbleed, details soon. When the details are out, total nothingburger, useless mitigation recommendations, incomplete report, misreported scope, different attack vectors, I've seen everything. It only feeds the CVE hype cycle to no use of the customers, victims and public.

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