Tag Archives: disclosure

Legal Restrictions on Vulnerability Disclosure

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/legal-restrictions-on-vulnerability-disclosure.html

Kendra Albert gave an excellent talk at USENIX Security this year, pointing out that the legal agreements surrounding vulnerability disclosure muzzle researchers while allowing companies to not fix the vulnerabilities—exactly the opposite of what the responsible disclosure movement of the early 2000s was supposed to prevent. This is the talk.

Thirty years ago, a debate raged over whether vulnerability disclosure was good for computer security. On one side, full disclosure advocates argued that software bugs weren’t getting fixed and wouldn’t get fixed if companies that made insecure software wasn’t called out publicly. On the other side, companies argued that full disclosure led to exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities, especially if they were hard to fix. After blog posts, public debates, and countless mailing list flame wars, there emerged a compromise solution: coordinated vulnerability disclosure, where vulnerabilities were disclosed after a period of confidentiality where vendors can attempt to fix things. Although full disclosure fell out of fashion, disclosure won and security through obscurity lost. We’ve lived happily ever after since.

Or have we? The move towards paid bug bounties and the rise of platforms that manage bug bounty programs for security teams has changed the reality of disclosure significantly. In certain cases, these programs require agreement to contractual restrictions. Under the status quo, that means that software companies sometimes funnel vulnerabilities into bug bounty management platforms and then condition submission on confidentiality agreements that can prohibit researchers from ever sharing their findings.

In this talk, I’ll explain how confidentiality requirements for managed bug bounty programs restrict the ability of those who attempt to report vulnerabilities to share their findings publicly, compromising the bargain at the center of the CVD process. I’ll discuss what contract law can tell us about how and when these restrictions are enforceable, and more importantly, when they aren’t, providing advice to hackers around how to understand their legal rights when submitting. Finally, I’ll call upon platforms and companies to adapt their practices to be more in line with the original bargain of coordinated vulnerability disclosure, including by banning agreements that require non-disclosure.

And this is me from 2007, talking about “responsible disclosure”:

This was a good idea—and these days it’s normal procedure—but one that was possible only because full disclosure was the norm. And it remains a good idea only as long as full disclosure is the threat.

Serious F5 Breach

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/10/serious-f5-breach.html

This is bad:

F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long-term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language to mean the hackers were inside the F5 network for years.

During that time, F5 said, the hackers took control of the network segment the company uses to create and distribute updates for BIG IP, a line of server appliances that F5 says is used by 48 of the world’s top 50 corporations. Wednesday’s disclosure went on to say the threat group downloaded proprietary BIG-IP source code information about vulnerabilities that had been privately discovered but not yet patched. The hackers also obtained configuration settings that some customers used inside their networks.

Control of the build system and access to the source code, customer configurations, and documentation of unpatched vulnerabilities has the potential to give the hackers unprecedented knowledge of weaknesses and the ability to exploit them in supply-chain attacks on thousands of networks, many of which are sensitive. The theft of customer configurations and other data further raises the risk that sensitive credentials can be abused, F5 and outside security experts said.

F5 announcement.

Hacking Electronic Safes

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/hacking-electronic-safes.html

Vulnerabilities in electronic safes that use Securam Prologic locks:

While both their techniques represent glaring security vulnerabilities, Omo says it’s the one that exploits a feature intended as a legitimate unlock method for locksmiths that’s the more widespread and dangerous. “This attack is something where, if you had a safe with this kind of lock, I could literally pull up the code right now with no specialized hardware, nothing,” Omo says. “All of a sudden, based on our testing, it seems like people can get into almost any Securam Prologic lock in the world.”

[…]

Omo and Rowley say they informed Securam about both their safe-opening techniques in spring of last year, but have until now kept their existence secret because of legal threats from the company. “We will refer this matter to our counsel for trade libel if you choose the route of public announcement or disclosure,” a Securam representative wrote to the two researchers ahead of last year’s Defcon, where they first planned to present their research.

Only after obtaining pro bono legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Coders’ Rights Project did the pair decide to follow through with their plan to speak about Securam’s vulnerabilities at Defcon. Omo and Rowley say they’re even now being careful not to disclose enough technical detail to help others replicate their techniques, while still trying to offer a warning to safe owners about two different vulnerabilities that exist in many of their devices.

The company says that it plans on updating its locks by the end of the year, but have no plans to patch any locks already sold.

A Cyberattack Victim Notification Framework

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/a-cyberattack-victim-notification-framework.html

Interesting analysis:

When cyber incidents occur, victims should be notified in a timely manner so they have the opportunity to assess and remediate any harm. However, providing notifications has proven a challenge across industry.

When making notifications, companies often do not know the true identity of victims and may only have a single email address through which to provide the notification. Victims often do not trust these notifications, as cyber criminals often use the pretext of an account compromise as a phishing lure.

[…]

This report explores the challenges associated with developing the native-notification concept and lays out a roadmap for overcoming them. It also examines other opportunities for more narrow changes that could both increase the likelihood that victims will both receive and trust notifications and be able to access support resources.

The report concludes with three main recommendations for cloud service providers (CSPs) and other stakeholders:

  1. Improve existing notification processes and develop best practices for industry.
  2. Support the development of “middleware” necessary to share notifications with victims privately, securely, and across multiple platforms including through native notifications.
  3. Improve support for victims following notification.

While further work remains to be done to develop and evaluate the CSRB’s proposed native notification capability, much progress can be made by implementing better notification and support practices by cloud service providers and other stakeholders in the near term.

Google Project Zero Changes Its Disclosure Policy

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/08/google-project-zero-changes-its-disclosure-policy.html

Google’s vulnerability finding team is again pushing the envelope of responsible disclosure:

Google’s Project Zero team will retain its existing 90+30 policy regarding vulnerability disclosures, in which it provides vendors with 90 days before full disclosure takes place, with a 30-day period allowed for patch adoption if the bug is fixed before the deadline.

However, as of July 29, Project Zero will also release limited details about any discovery they make within one week of vendor disclosure. This information will encompass:

  • The vendor or open-source project that received the report
  • The affected product
  • The date the report was filed and when the 90-day disclosure deadline expires

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I like that it puts more pressure on vendors to patch quickly. On the other hand, if no indication is provided regarding how severe a vulnerability is, it could easily cause unnecessary panic.

The problem is that Google is not a neutral vulnerability hunting party. To the extent that it finds, publishes, and reduces confidence in competitors’ products, Google benefits as a company.

Microsoft Executives Hacked

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/01/microsoft-executives-hacked.html

Microsoft is reporting that a Russian intelligence agency—the same one responsible for SolarWinds—accessed the email system of the company’s executives.

Beginning in late November 2023, the threat actor used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gain a foothold, and then used the account’s permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, and exfiltrated some emails and attached documents. The investigation indicates they were initially targeting email accounts for information related to Midnight Blizzard itself.

This is nutty. How does a “legacy non-production test tenant account” have access to executive e-mails? And why no try-factor authentication?

Ransomware Gang Files SEC Complaint

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/11/ransomware-gang-files-sec-complaint.html

A ransomware gang, annoyed at not being paid, filed an SEC complaint against its victim for not disclosing its security breach within the required four days.

This is over the top, but is just another example of the extreme pressure ransomware gangs put on companies after seizing their data. Gangs are now going through the data, looking for particularly important or embarrassing pieces of data to threaten executives with exposing. I have heard stories of executives’ families being threatened, of consensual porn being identified (people regularly mix work and personal email) and exposed, and of victims’ customers and partners being directly contacted. Ransoms are in the millions, and gangs do their best to ensure that the pressure to pay is intense.

New SEC Rules around Cybersecurity Incident Disclosures

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/08/new-sec-rules-around-cybersecurity-incident-disclosures.html

The US Securities and Exchange Commission adopted final rules around the disclosure of cybersecurity incidents. There are two basic rules:

  1. Public companies must “disclose any cybersecurity incident they determine to be material” within four days, with potential delays if there is a national security risk.
  2. Public companies must “describe their processes, if any, for assessing, identifying, and managing material risks from cybersecurity threats” in their annual filings.

The rules go into effect this December.

In an email newsletter, Melissa Hathaway wrote:

Now that the rule is final, companies have approximately six months to one year to document and operationalize the policies and procedures for the identification and management of cybersecurity (information security/privacy) risks. Continuous assessment of the risk reduction activities should be elevated within an enterprise risk management framework and process. Good governance mechanisms delineate the accountability and responsibility for ensuring successful execution, while actionable, repeatable, meaningful, and time-dependent metrics or key performance indicators (KPI) should be used to reinforce realistic objectives and timelines. Management should assess the competency of the personnel responsible for implementing these policies and be ready to identify these people (by name) in their annual filing.

News article.

AI Hacking Village at DEF CON This Year

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/05/ai-hacking-village-at-def-con-this-year.html

At DEF CON this year, Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Stability AI will all open up their models for attack.

The DEF CON event will rely on an evaluation platform developed by Scale AI, a California company that produces training for AI applications. Participants will be given laptops to use to attack the models. Any bugs discovered will be disclosed using industry-standard responsible disclosure practices.

Responsible Disclosure for Cryptocurrency Security

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/09/responsible-disclosure-for-cryptocurrency-security.html

Stewart Baker discusses why the industry-norm responsible disclosure for software vulnerabilities fails for cryptocurrency software.

Why can’t the cryptocurrency industry solve the problem the way the software and hardware industries do, by patching and updating security as flaws are found? Two reasons: First, many customers don’t have an ongoing relationship with the hardware and software providers that protect their funds­—nor do they have an incentive to update security on a regular basis. Turning to a new security provider or using updated software creates risks; leaving everything the way it was feels safer. So users won’t be rushing to pay for and install new security patches.

Second, cryptocurrency is famously and deliberately decentralized, anonymized, and low friction. That means that the company responsible for hardware or software security may have no way to identify who used its product, or to get the patch to those users. It also means that many wallets with security flaws will be publicly accessible, protected only by an elaborate password. Once word of the flaw leaks, the password can be reverse engineered by anyone, and the legitimate owners are likely to find themselves in a race to move their assets before the thieves do. Even in the software industry, hackers routinely reverse engineer Microsoft’s patches to find the security flaws they fix and then try to exploit them before the patches have been fully installed.

He doesn’t have any good ideas to fix this. I don’t either. Just add it to the pile of blockchain’s many problems.

Wyze Camera Vulnerability

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/04/wyze-camera-vulnerability.html

Wyze ignored a vulnerability in its home security cameras for three years. Bitdefender, who discovered the vulnerability, let the company get away with it.

In case you’re wondering, no, that is not normal in the security community. While experts tell me that the concept of a “responsible disclosure timeline” is a little outdated and heavily depends on the situation, we’re generally measuring in days, not years. “The majority of researchers have policies where if they make a good faith effort to reach a vendor and don’t get a response, that they publicly disclose in 30 days,” Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former chief security officer at Facebook, tells me.

Missouri Governor Doesn’t Understand Responsible Disclosure

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/10/the-missouri-governor-doesnt-understand-responsible-disclosure.html

The Missouri governor wants to prosecute the reporter who discovered a security vulnerability in a state’s website, and then reported it to the state.

The newspaper agreed to hold off publishing any story while the department fixed the problem and protected the private information of teachers around the state.

[…]

According to the Post-Dispatch, one of its reporters discovered the flaw in a web application allowing the public to search teacher certifications and credentials. No private information was publicly visible, but teacher Social Security numbers were contained in HTML source code of the pages.

The state removed the search tool after being notified of the issue by the Post-Dispatch. It was unclear how long the Social Security numbers had been vulnerable.

[…]

Chris Vickery, a California-based data security expert, told The Independent that it appears the department of education was “publishing data that it shouldn’t have been publishing.

“That’s not a crime for the journalists discovering it,” he said. “Putting Social Security numbers within HTML, even if it’s ‘non-display rendering’ HTML, is a stupid thing for the Missouri website to do and is a type of boneheaded mistake that has been around since day one of the Internet. No exploit, hacking or vulnerability is involved here.”

In explaining how he hopes the reporter and news organization will be prosecuted, [Gov.] Parson pointed to a state statute defining the crime of tampering with computer data. Vickery said that statute wouldn’t work in this instance because of a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Van Buren v. United States.

One hopes that someone will calm the governor down.

Brian Krebs has more.

China Taking Control of Zero-Day Exploits

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/07/china-taking-control-of-zero-day-exploits.html

China is making sure that all newly discovered zero-day exploits are disclosed to the government.

Under the new rules, anyone in China who finds a vulnerability must tell the government, which will decide what repairs to make. No information can be given to “overseas organizations or individuals” other than the product’s manufacturer.

No one may “collect, sell or publish information on network product security vulnerabilities,” say the rules issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China and the police and industry ministries.

This just blocks the cyber-arms trade. It doesn’t prevent researchers from telling the products’ companies, even if they are outside of China.