> Baseten handled this well. The timeline was:
> July 13, 11:10 PM: I reported the live basetenbot token, the public Harbor project, and the repository permissions.
> July 14, morning: Baseten made the Harbor project private. I flagged that the token itself still worked.
> July 14, 4:34 PM: Anton from Baseten Security confirmed the issue as critical and said they had made the Harbor project private and rotated the token. He also asked us to securely delete the images we'd pulled.
> July 14, 5:05 PM: We confirmed deletion and sent over two lower-severity findings from the same scan.
> July 17: Baseten closed out the remaining findings.
> September: We let Baseten know we planned to disclose the finding publicly and sent them a draft of this post.
They also sent us some T-shirts and sweatshirts as a thank-you for finding this critical bug.
well done all around. i think my only open question is what default security boundaries should all vibecoded internal agents follow as a learning we can take from this
Good in terms of prompt communication and fix. Absurdly bad in terms of reward.
Earlier in the article, it mentions that Baseten is valued at $13B. They can't dig into their couch cushions to give a few thousand dollars to the researcher privately disclosing a bug that let an attacker escalate to admin in their GitHub org?
This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
> Absurdly bad in terms of reward
This is two companies working together. Most of the comments below are assuming this was an independent security researcher doing work on their own time. This was professionals doing work for their companies on both sides.
> This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
The reason they were looking for bugs was in the context of a B2B relationship, not as a someone independent on their nights and weekends.
If they give them any additional compensation it would probably be in some amount of free or discounted services, which is what they’d want anyway.
The main payment is all the viral advertising that this AI hacking tool is getting right now. Hard to put a price on that.
Literally paid in exposure.
Swag packages like these are a token of appreciation not a reward.
The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .
Most people who find a dropped wallet will return it without evaluating the market value of your compromised identity or the contents of the wallet .
Grateful owners may buy you a beer that doesn’t make them cheap , not everything is evaluated in purely money terms, and that is a good thing ?
> The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .
not always, especially if its just someone independent. iirc there was a guy here not too long ago who started dropping Windows 0days because Microsoft couldn't be assed to process his bug reports
That actually supports the point that people aren't acting under purely financial motivations. If the guy was purely following financial motivations, surely he would have chosen to sell the vulnerabilities to the shadier side of things. Instead, he dumped them publicly, burning their value while amplifying the "fuck you" factor to Microsoft.
Ignoring reports, or just fixing the vulnerability without acknowledging the work put in by a researcher, is rude and invites rudeness in return.
Microsoft runs a bug bounty program. NightmareEclipse (that’s the researcher’s handle) allegedly participated and Microsoft did not honor their part of the bug bounty program terms.
This is a completely different situation - a company evaluates the security of a prospective vendor prior to entering a business agreement.
> iirc there was a guy here not too long ago who started dropping Windows 0days because Microsoft couldn't be assed to process his bug reports
Did that ever actually happen? I remember him threatening to start dropping 0days and getting a lot of press coverage for it. When I tried to look it up I didn’t find anything at the time.
> New Microsoft Defender 'ShieldCrash' zero-day grants SYSTEM access
https://bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-microsoft-def...
“Nightmare Eclipse released these zero-day exploits as part of an ongoing dispute with Microsoft over the company's bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure practices. […] Since April, the anonymous security researcher has disclosed a long list of zero-day flaws, including ShieldBreak, LegacyHive, RoguePlanet, BlueHammer, RedSun, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, MiniPlasma, and UnDefend, targeting Microsoft Defender, BitLocker, and other Windows components.”
Wallets usually belong to real people with lives. We can empathize with them. Companies are not people. And they also don't and can't empathize with you.
>Wallets usually belong to real people with lives.
So does data ? it belongs to real people.
I would imagine baseten's customers and eventually their end-users[1] were also grateful that their data was not compromised here and the disclosure was responsible.
[1] There is a pretty good chance you and I could be using services who are using baseten
"and can't empathize with you" - I don't really understand why such a perception of companies has been regurgitated and reinforced so much in US public, to the point where it's a blank excuse from ever expecting such a thing from a company. It's not true that it can't. The only reason to keep repeating that kind of worldview is to absolve companies behaving in shitty, toxic or downright evil ways.
The law doesn't say companies MUST choose the most profitable choice at every turn, and even explicitly allows for good treatment of customers, community, employees etc as a viable business strategy (even if it's sad that it must be justified in that way).
> The only reason to keep repeating that kind of worldview is to absolve companies behaving in shitty, toxic or downright evil ways.
Or...to warn people away from ever expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies, and remind people not to trust them?
I think the only misleading part of this situation is your naive and self-centered definition of "trust", and the assumption that so many others think similarly enough that they need to be warned.
I trust a business to fulfill their obligations as stated in writing for the money paid. I do not trust them in any other way. Nobody should "trust" or depend on undefined behavior. Common sense can only ever be as common as you expect.
> your naive and self-centered definition of "trust"
I never gave one? For what it's worth, I agree with your second paragraph, despite your first being needlessly aggressive.
I agree that this notion that companies make these decisions is bad, bad on the grounds that it's people working for those companies that make the decisions, they hide themselves away, but the company itself isn't doing anything - is always a human making the decision
I think the point is that companies are purely legal entities, and as such, cannot feel, much less empathize, simply by virtue of them not being living things
That's nonsense. "Companies" are not something non-human, they are run by humans, who do feel, empathize, and are living beings. Without these living-being humans, there would simply be no "company".
Now how those humans that run the company behave is another thing - they are free to be greedy assholes, and a lot of them are, and some of them aren't - but that's still a human thing.
Companies are 100% people. The fact that companies, their CEOs, and employees are not treated like people is exactly reason why humanity is in the shitshow show it is right now.
Thank you for pushing back on one of the top disruptive bad-faith comments we see on HN.
The follow up arguments will be that since billion dollar companies ultimately only care about their bottom line, so should we.
I'm certain most of these comments mean well (to "open eyes" or whatever), but some of them really are on principle and blatant astroturfing.
> The follow up arguments will be that since billion dollar companies ultimately only care about their bottom line, so should we.
so it should be fought by giving them free work in the hopes that they'll finally feel guilty and then start paying proper bounties?
like to me that just seems funny, as if they'd change anything if we'd keep rewarding them for not doing the right thing
like, there's a reason regulation exists for all kinds of shit because otherwise companies would do all kinds of atrocities in hopes of cutting costs
> free work
Don't know if I would call it that ?
This was a potential customer reporting a result of an audit of a tool they are evaluating. This is frequent and normal activity in enterprise deals. Most of the time such reports are not critical vulnerabilities it would things like tenant configuration -what business would like versus what CISO will accept or risk acceptance of the product they are buying with monitoring or other prescription on access restrictions or a DPA and so on.
It would be novel business model to spend ton of money in getting a prospect to late-deal stage where they are ready to do a security audio for you just so that part is "free" .
Most companies wouldn't disclose(to the public) even if it was serious , that is not their job, they will report to internal teams and re-review on fix. Strix.ai has a benefit in doing so as they sell a scanning tool for this purpose so we get to hear of this.
At some point, you will realize two things.
First, you're being petty and just fighting fire with fire. Second, most of this research is fairly trivial.
What you're instead encouraging is a race to the bottom. You're not going to kill off the companies you hate by withholding information. You don't even have that power anyway because by its very nature, security research is not secret. You're really just encouraging pessimistic groupthink and bad faith. This is why businesses can't be more open about their flaws. It's not that they're stupid and incompetent, but that the pitchforks come out. These are the seeds of dystopia.
They would have eventually figured it out, but as an unfortunate incident with an outsized effect. As much as you wish it to be true, even the worst of these incidents will not kill their business. As much as you hate these businesses, their financial momentum will eventually cause the public to depend on them more. There's more at stake here than anyone's personal gain. It's naive to think otherwise.
You're just manifesting broken windows and ignoring litter thinking you're fighting the man. This is straight up ghetto punk ass behavior wearing a white collar.
> You're just manifesting broken windows and ignoring litter thinking you're fighting the man. This is straight up ghetto punk ass behavior wearing a white collar.
are you replying to the right person?
I'm not hating on any business or trying to "kill" any business.
I'm saying serve yourself, not them. if you have say, a 0 day on your hands, do what serves you best.
is that "ghetto punk ass behavior"?
what are you on about?
> I'm saying serve yourself, not them. if you have say, a 0 day on your hands, do what serves you best. is that "ghetto punk ass behavior"?
Yes.
If you have say, managed to find an overlooked passage into an ostensibly high security building, "doing what serves you best" such as selling the information to some thugs, is in fact that kind of behavior.
[dead]
It's nice to wax poetic, but they should absolutely pay the researchers here.
Yeah companies need to quickly understand that having good actors try and hack you is a good thing - those hacks get reported and another door gets sealed shut for bad actors.
This is more true today than ever before as the bar for a successful attack has never been lower. We’ll see a resurgence of the script-kiddie, or shall I say, vibe-kiddie :-/
The researcher in this case was doing a security review for their company who was a potential customer. Sending potential customers more than a token amount of cash is usually prohibited by corporate ethics rules for obvious reasons.
That's incorrect. It's not only perfectly acceptable, but absolutely vital, to pay someone for their services (incl a customer) for assisting with an existential threat against the corporation.
Any counsel or HR who would draft a corporate ethics rule that wouldn't allow for a bug bounty to be paid out on a massive vulnerability, merely because the person was "a potential customer", should be immediately replaced.
of course not, all they can do is a lil "thx"
> This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
of course, these companies want you to sell vulns to brokers and other orgs. they don't care about bug reports.
otherwise they'd pay as much or even more, right?
Shouldn't the first step have been to roll the token?
This is probably still considered standard response timeline, not a rapid one.
The time window allowing for CVEs + Vulnerabilities remediation has been collapsing to days and hours perhaps even minutes[1]. Anyone who has an OpenRouter account can start using Strix + GLM 5.3 Flash to do damages at frontier Mytho 5 level cyber capabilities. [2]
This cyber patching race is on, won't stop until all the software created for the past 70 years still in active use needs to be patched up. This is happening at EVERY SINGLE software company.
The cost of not doing it? Game over.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49699402
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49705036
Meanwhile I have customers running legacy web apps last compiled over five years ago on end-of-life operating systems… and it’s crickets chirping. Dead quiet, not even a hint of an attack, let alone a breach.
I expected them to have been hacked to pieces by now, but even “maximally vulnerable” internet-facing apps seem to be relatively unmolested so far.
Maybe it’s still too expensive to go after “boring” enterprise targets? Maybe the bad actors targeted crypto systems first for the immense payoffs, if successful?
> it’s still too expensive to go after “boring” enterprise targets?
The economic argument seems convincing to me. I can’t tell what your stance on it is.
You’re the only one that knows the value of these targets, but “not worth it” seems likely to me.
It's a risk-reward ratio, same as anything else, whether legal or illegal.
You wouldn't organise the equivalent of an elaborate bank heist to break into a child's piggy bank, it's just not worth it.
I have heard of a few high profile crypto heists that appear to be AI-assisted, some as far back as the GPT 3.5 era. There was an article I can't find any more about someone accidentally pushing a security fix to a public repo and getting their wallets drained via that specific mechanism within something like an hour.
Malicious actors are watching crypto like a cat in front of a mouse hole, because a "success" can net them the equivalent of hundreds of millions of USD that they can instantly transfer, launder, and spend.
For comparison, what would they achieve by hacking the web site of a local council or public library? Cause some embarrassment? Attempt to crypto-locker them? What are the chances of a payout? Certainly not a 100%, and you're also certain to get the attention of the local equivalent of the FBI or Homeland Security.
Anyone can push people onto the railway tracks at a metro station but they don't. Being able to cause damage doesn't mean people will.
I’d treat a vibecoded agent like an untrusted CI job, not like a junior employee: repo-scoped identity, read-only by default, no inherited Actions token or production secrets. Any operation that turns a read into a write should require approval outside the agent’s control and produce an auditable diff. Network egress belongs in the boundary too. Read-only access is not much protection if the agent can send everything it reads to an arbitrary endpoint.
Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
> They also sent us some T-shirts and sweatshirts as a thank-you for finding this critical bug.
Honestly I would have held out for a (hard to get) hardcover copy of Inference Engineering.
signed too!