[HN Gopher] CVE Stuffing
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       CVE Stuffing
        
       Author : CapacitorSet
       Score  : 214 points
       Date   : 2021-01-02 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (jerrygamblin.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (jerrygamblin.com)
        
       | easterncalculus wrote:
       | Lots of CVEs are illegitimate. You have people creating whole
       | "vulnerabilities" that are just long known features of various
       | technologies. The worst one I'm remembering is the "discovery" of
       | "Zip Slip" and "ZipperDown", which were both just gotchas in the
       | zip format that have been known about for decades now. Both got
       | trendy websites just like Spectre and Meltdown, and loads of
       | headlines. ZipperDown.org is now an online slots website.
       | 
       | - https://snyk.io/research/zip-slip-vulnerability
       | 
       | - http://phrack.org/issues/34/5.html#article
       | 
       | - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry_yb5Oipq0
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | eyeareque wrote:
       | Mitre is a us gov supported team, and previously they could not
       | scale to the need of their efforts. They did the best they could,
       | but they still had a lot of angry people out there. The whole
       | world uses CVEs but it is US funded by the way.
       | 
       | In come new CNAs, scale the efforts through trusted teams, which
       | makes sense. The mitre team can only do so much on their own.
       | 
       | Unfortunately I don't think anyone will be as strict and
       | passionate about getting CVEs done right, like the original mitre
       | team has.
       | 
       | Here is to hoping they can revoke cna status from teams who
       | consistently do not meet a quality bar.
        
         | tamirzb wrote:
         | The problem though is that issues with CVEs are not caused only
         | by bad CNAs. MITRE (understandably) doesn't have the resources
         | to verify every CVE request it receives, which have resulted in
         | bad CVE details being filed on multiple occasions.
         | 
         | I wonder if maybe, instead of trying to fix CVEs, we could try
         | to think about creating alternatives? I know some companies
         | already use their own identifiers (e.g. Samsung with SVE), so
         | perhaps a big group of respected companies can come together to
         | create a new unified identifier? Just an idea though.
        
       | tptacek wrote:
       | I understand the frustration, and I'm pretty sure the root cause
       | is straightforward ("number of CVEs generated" is a figure of
       | merit in several places in the security field, especially
       | resumes, even though it is a stupid metric).
       | 
       | But the problem, I think, contains its own solution. The purpose
       | of CVEs is to ensure that we're talking about the same
       | vulnerability when we discuss a vulnerability; to canonicalize
       | well-known vulnerabilities. It's not to create a reliable feed of
       | all vulnerabilities, and certainly not as an awards system for
       | soi-disant vulnerability researchers.
       | 
       | If we stopped asking so much from CVEs, stopped paying attention
       | to resume and product claims of CVEs generated (or detected, or
       | scanned for, or whatever), and stopped trying to build services
       | that monitor CVEs, we might see a lot less bogus data. And,
       | either way, the bogus data would probably matter less.
       | 
       | (Don't get me started on CVSS).
        
         | currymj wrote:
         | this sounds similar to problems with peer review in academia.
         | it mostly works fine as a guardrail to enforce scholarly norms.
         | 
         | however many institutions want to outsource responsibility for
         | their own high-stakes decisions to the peer review system.
         | whether it's citing peer-reviewed articles to justify policy,
         | or counting publications to make big hiring decisions.
         | 
         | It introduces very strong incentives to game the system -- now
         | getting any paper published in a decent venue is very high-
         | stakes, and peer review just isn't meant for that -- it can't
         | really be made robust enough.
         | 
         | i don't know what the solution is in situations like this,
         | other than what you propose -- get the outside entities to take
         | responsibility for making their own judgments. but that's more
         | expensive and risky for them, so why would they do it?
         | 
         | It feels kind of like a public good problem but I don't know
         | what kind exactly. The problem isn't that people are overusing
         | a public good, but that just by using it at all they introduce
         | distorting incentives which ruins it.
        
           | tptacek wrote:
           | My basic take is: if "CVE stuffing" bothers you, really the
           | only available solution is to stop being bothered by it,
           | because the incentives don't exist to prevent it. People
           | submitting bogus or marginal CVEs are going to keep doing
           | that, and CNAs aren't staffed and funded to serve as the
           | world's vulnerability arbiters, and even if they were, people
           | competent to serve in that role have better things to do.
           | 
           | The problem is the misconception ordinary users have about
           | what CVEs are; the abuses are just a symptom.
        
             | currymj wrote:
             | I suspect for both peer review and CVEs, and probably some
             | similar situations I'm not thinking of, it's not just a
             | misconception, it's often more like wishful thinking.
             | 
             | People really want there to be a way of telling what's good
             | and important that doesn't cost them any money or effort.
             | Ironically these systems can sort-of work for that purpose,
             | only if people don't try to use them for that purpose.
        
               | astrobe_ wrote:
               | I think both are instances of Goodhart-Campbell-
               | Strathern's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it
               | ceases to be a good measure."
        
       | fractionalhare wrote:
       | That sucks. Perhaps the most annoying part of modern infosec is
       | the absolute deluge of noise you get from scanning tools.
       | Superfluous CVEs like this contribute to the sea of red security
       | engineers wake up to when they look at their dashboards.
       | Unsurprisingly, these are eventually mostly ignored.
       | 
       | Every large security organization requires scanning tooling like
       | Coalfire, Checkmarx, Fortify and Nessus, but I've rarely seen
       | them used in an actionable way. Good security teams come up with
       | their own (effective) ways of tracking new security incidents or
       | vastly filtering the output of these tools.
       | 
       | The current state of CVEs and CVE scanning is that you'll have to
       | wrangle with bullshit security reports if you run any nontrivial
       | software. This is especially the case if you have significant
       | third party JavaScript libraries or images. And unfortunately you
       | can't just literally ignore it, because infrequently one of those
       | red rows in the dashboard will actually represent something like
       | Heartbleed.
        
         | futevolei wrote:
         | The non stop stream of emails every day certainly sucks but
         | falls far short of my employers false positive process which
         | requires several emails explaining why it's false positive and
         | following up to make sure the waiver is applied so as to not
         | impact our security rating instead of just reassigning the jira
         | ticket and adding false positive label.
        
         | bartread wrote:
         | We use Nessus and it's not too bad on the false positive front.
         | I usually check the scan results every week or two to see if it
         | finds anything new, and I know our Head of IT also keeps an eye
         | on them. In an ideal world we'd automate this away but have a
         | raft of more pressing priorities.
         | 
         | We also use tools like Dependabot to keep an eye out for
         | vulnerabilities in our dependencies, and update them to patched
         | versions. This is genuinely useful and a worthwhile timesaver
         | on more complex projects.
         | 
         | It's easy to be cynical about automated scanning (and pen-
         | testing for that matter) and, although it's often needed as a
         | checkbox for certification, it can certainly add value to your
         | development process.
        
         | mnd999 wrote:
         | > The current state of CVEs and CVE scanning is that you'll
         | have to wrangle with bullshit security reports if you run any
         | nontrivial software.
         | 
         | Especially if you have customers who outsourced their infosec
         | to the lowest bidder who insist every BS CVE is critical and
         | must be fixed.
        
           | whydoyoucare wrote:
           | This ^^^. I have experienced it first hand for the last year
           | or so, and it gets really annoying!
        
       | hendry wrote:
       | Communication breakdown.
       | 
       | It's a bit naughty how "security researchers" don't appear to
       | make a good effort to communicate upstream.
       | 
       | And the fact that Jerry has problems reaching out to NVD or Mitre
       | is worrying.
        
       | dx87 wrote:
       | I think this goes hand-in-hand with people naming security
       | vulnerabilities and trying to make it a big spectacle. Sometimes
       | it is a legit serious vulnerability, like shellshock or
       | heartbleed, but a lot are just novices trying to get their 15
       | minutes of fame. I remember a few years back there was a
       | "vulnerability" named GRINCH, where the person who discovered it
       | claimed it was a root priviledge escalation that worked on all
       | versions of Red Hat and CentOS. They made a website and
       | everything for it, and tried to hype it up before disclosing what
       | it was. Turns out the "vulnerability" was members of the wheel
       | group being able to use sudo to run commands as root.
        
         | tptacek wrote:
         | It's hard for me to think of a serious downside for named
         | vulnerabilities. People who try to name sev:lo bugs get made
         | fun of; it backfires.
        
           | dx87 wrote:
           | It just causes extra annoyance at work. There have been a few
           | times when some named vulnerability gets covered by a generic
           | tech website, and the next day at work my inbox has 2-3
           | meeting invites from non-technical project managers to
           | discuss what needs to be done to mitigate the vulnerability,
           | regardless of its severity, and without even knowing if our
           | organization is vulnerable to it.
        
       | brohee wrote:
       | Didn't check who filled those bugs, but I've seen companies
       | requiring having discovered CVE to apply for some jobs, and the
       | natural consequence is gaming the system...
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | sanxiyn wrote:
         | I checked, it seems to be a student of Seoul National
         | University, South Korea. https://github.com/donghyunlee00/CVE
        
           | rvp-x wrote:
           | Huh. I wonder if it's a student doing an assignment and not
           | realizing they're submitting to a real database.
           | 
           | Their other GitHub work is following tutorials, labs and
           | courses.
        
           | hoppla wrote:
           | A second guy is also doing this. CVEs have a reference to
           | third party advisories such as
           | https://github.com/koharin/koharin2/blob/main/CVE-2020-35185
           | 
           | This repository does no longer exists.
        
       | bregma wrote:
       | I'm a command-line development tools maintainer for an OS. I am
       | not unfamiliar with high-level CVEs in my inbox with the likes of
       | "gdb crashes on a handcrafted core file causing a DoS". I am
       | unfamiliar with a real world in which a simple old-fashioned
       | segfault in a crash analysis tool is truly a denial of service
       | security vulnerability, but our security department assures us we
       | need to drop all revenue work and rush out a fix because our
       | customers may already be aware that our product is shipping with
       | a known CVE.
       | 
       | There are occasions in which I recognize a CVE as a vulnerability
       | to a legitimate possible threat to an asset. By and large,
       | however, they seem to be marketing material for either
       | organizations offering "protection" or academics seeking
       | publication.
       | 
       | I think like anything else of value, inflation will eat away at
       | the CVE system until something newer and once again effective
       | will come along.
        
         | raverbashing wrote:
         | Ah yes, this also fits with the famous "no insecure algorithms"
         | in which an auditor will check a box if your use md5, even if
         | for a feature totally unrelated to security.
        
           | Macha wrote:
           | Our security team at a previous employer previously added a
           | systemwide checker to our github enterprise installation that
           | would spam comments on any change to a file in which
           | Math.random is used. The idea is that anyone using random
           | numbers must be implementing a cryptographic protocol and
           | therefore should not be using Math.random as it's not a
           | CSPRNG.
           | 
           | So all the AB tests, percentage rollouts etc. started getting
           | spam PR comments until they were made to turn it back off
           | again.
           | 
           | Frankly if a teammate was writing their own crypto algorithm
           | implemntation in the bog standard web app we working on, that
           | would be more concerning than which RNG they're using.
        
           | consp wrote:
           | I've seen exactly this many times in audits (gets them a high
           | score!). If they flag it and not check the usage I know they
           | didn't bother putting anyone good on the audit or only ran
           | automated stuff and it is pretty much useless. The same can
           | now be said for sha1, gets them results quickly and looks
           | good on the final report.
        
         | beardedwizard wrote:
         | Maybe you can get on the phone with your customers, their
         | security teams, and their compliance teams and explain every
         | single day why these known vulnerabilities are not serious and
         | can never be leveraged. You can convince them all of these
         | latent bugs will never pose a serious risk. You can do this all
         | day every day. Or you can just patch, and maintain a capability
         | to do so quickly because bugs don't just affect security and
         | the inability to update dependencies is really a reflection of
         | awful development practices.
        
           | nullc wrote:
           | It's sad, however, when a highly non-exploitable crash is
           | treated as a five alarm fire while a "silently corrupts users
           | data" falls to the wayside because people don't generally
           | write security vulnerability reports for those.
           | 
           | I've heard from some people that they have considered filing
           | security CVEs against non-security but high user impact bugs
           | in software that they're working on, just to regain control
           | of priorities from CVE spammers.
        
             | beardedwizard wrote:
             | Agree, but having to make these judgement calls at all is a
             | mistake. We need to get to 'just fix it'.
        
           | bartread wrote:
           | > really a reflection of awful development practices.
           | 
           | You don't know a thing about GP's development practices so
           | perhaps you should be a bit slower to hurl accusations.
        
           | arp242 wrote:
           | "Never fix it" is one extreme.
           | 
           | "Drop all revenue work and rush out a fix" is another.
           | 
           | The previous poster didn't say it should never get fixed, but
           | rather that there's some nuance to be had in these things,
           | and that fixing it in e.g. the next release is usually just
           | fine too.
        
             | beardedwizard wrote:
             | No disagreement here. What is dangerous for me is the idea
             | that difficulty upgrading for security fixes does not
             | predict the same difficulty for other fixes. It's not that
             | security bugs are uniquely hard to patch, it's that
             | dependency management on the whole is neglected and
             | security gets the blame.
             | 
             | Those crusty old dependencies and the processes around them
             | are an operational risk, we should be lowering the bar to
             | just patching rather than picking and choosing.
        
               | tsimionescu wrote:
               | You are assuming that this is about dependencies. OP's
               | example is explicitly "gdb crashes when opening on a
               | malformed core dump and can be used for DoS". If you were
               | working on GDB and got this bug report, would you
               | consider it a fire to be put out immediately? Or would it
               | be a low-impact bug to be looked at when someone gets
               | some free time?
               | 
               | The OP is complaining that, if there is a CVE associated
               | for whatever stupid reason, the bug suddenly jumps from a
               | "might fix" to "hot potato".
        
               | beardedwizard wrote:
               | That's fair
        
               | arp242 wrote:
               | Who is talking about "crusty old dependencies"? Or
               | processes which are an "operational risk"? The previous
               | poster never mentioned any of those things.
        
               | beardedwizard wrote:
               | They get old and crusty when you have to choose not to
               | patch, or de prioritize those not so serious bugs because
               | the operational cost is too high.
               | 
               | Developers shouldn't have to make this call, the cost
               | should be zero.
        
           | hoppla wrote:
           | It will probably be less effort to patch (increment version
           | number) a non existing vulnerability than to explain it to
           | every customer that comes with an report from a third party
           | auditor.
           | 
           | CVEs for non-vulnerabilities is like corporate trolling
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | smsm42 wrote:
       | I feel this is the consequence of paying people for security bugs
       | reporting (and only _security_ bugs reporting). People start to
       | inflate the number of reports and no longer care about proper
       | severity assignment as long as it get them that coveted
       | "security bug" checkbox. I mean I can see how bounty programs and
       | projects like hackerone can be beneficial, but this is one of the
       | downsides of it.
       | 
       | CNA system actually is better since it at least puts some filter
       | on it - before it was Wild West, anybody could assign CVE to any
       | issue in any product without any feedback from anybody
       | knowledgeable in the code base and assign any severity they
       | liked, which led to wildly misleading reports. I think CNA at
       | least provides some sourcing information and order to it.
        
       | lmilcin wrote:
       | CVE DoS -- post so many CVEs to paralyze the system completely.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | TimWolla wrote:
       | See additional context in this issue in docker-library/memcached:
       | https://github.com/docker-library/memcached/issues/63#issuec...
       | 
       | And this issue in my docker-adminer:
       | https://github.com/TimWolla/docker-adminer/issues/89
        
       | jart wrote:
       | I remember when people in the security community started filing
       | CVEs against the TensorFlow project, claiming that code execution
       | was possible with a handcrafted TensorFlow graph, and the team
       | would have to try and explain, "TensorFlow GraphDefs _are_ code
       | ".
        
         | belval wrote:
         | The whole situation around CVE in Tensorflow is very painful,
         | you get GitHub security notifications for any public repository
         | using TF because of a "known CVE", even though it's basically
         | just a train.py script that is not deployed anywhere.
        
       | jebronie wrote:
       | A security auditor once reported a Adobe generator comment in an
       | SVG file as a moderate "version leak vulnerability" to me.
        
         | smsm42 wrote:
         | This is a staple of audit report stuffing. Somebody got an idea
         | that disclosing a version of anything anywhere is a huge
         | security hole, so now any publicly visible version string
         | generates a "moderate" (they are usually not as brazen as to
         | call it "critical") security report.
        
       | MrStonedOne wrote:
       | Way back when I saw a report on hackernews about secret exposure
       | from websites that deployed directly via a git repo as a webroot
       | and didn't block access to .git/
       | 
       | I added a cheeky message to my site's .git/ folder if you
       | attempted to view it.
       | 
       | About 2 or 3 months later I started getting "security reports" to
       | the catch all, about an exposed git folder that was leaking my
       | website's secrets.
       | 
       | Apparently because my site didn't return 404, their script
       | assumed i was exposed and they _oh so helpfully_ reported it to
       | me.
       | 
       | Got like 4 or 5 before i decided to make it 404 so they would
       | stop, mainly because i didn't want to bring false positive
       | fatigue on to "security exploit" subject line emails.
       | 
       | I have a feeling CNAs are bringing this kind of low effort zero
       | regard for false positive fatigue bullshit to CVEs. Might as well
       | just rip that bandaid off now and stop trusting anything besides
       | the debian security mailing list.
        
         | seanwilson wrote:
         | > Apparently because my site didn't return 404, their script
         | assumed i was exposed and they oh so helpfully reported it to
         | me.
         | 
         | There's no good reason that folder should exist except for a
         | joke, so how is this not a helpful message in the vast majority
         | of cases? All lint rules have exceptions, doesn't make them not
         | useful.
        
           | arp242 wrote:
           | I didn't ask you to lint my code (or server) though.
           | 
           | There's plenty of cases where a .git directory is just
           | harmless; I've deployed simple static sites by just cloning
           | the repo, and this probably exposed the .git directory. But
           | who cares? There's nothing in there that's secret, and it's
           | just the same as what you would get from the public GitHub
           | repo, so whatever.
           | 
           | That some linting tools warns on this: sure, that's
           | reasonable.
           | 
           | That random bots start emailing me about this without even
           | the slightest scrutiny because it _might_ expose my super-
           | duper secret proprietary code: that 's just spam and rude.
        
             | seanwilson wrote:
             | > That some linting tools warns on this: sure, that's
             | reasonable.
             | 
             | To clarify, I'm not condoning annoying spam but if say e.g.
             | Netlify or GitHub added a ".git folder should not exist on
             | a public site" lint rule when you personally deploy your
             | site, I would say it would be a net benefit.
             | 
             | > There's plenty of cases where a .git directory is just
             | harmless
             | 
             | Pretty much all lint rules have false positives so this
             | isn't a good yardstick. Can it potentially cause harm when
             | you do it and is there's no beneficial reason to do it? If
             | yes to both then it's an ideal candidate for a lint rule.
        
               | Kalium wrote:
               | > Pretty much all lint rules have false positives so this
               | isn't a good yardstick. Can it potentially cause harm
               | when you do it and is there's no beneficial reason to do
               | it? If yes to both then it's an ideal candidate for a
               | lint rule.
               | 
               | A responsible person running such a linter does a sanity
               | check before taking their positive and bugging someone
               | else with it. An irresponsible one potentially causes
               | harm by assuming every single hit is a major finding that
               | should turn into a bounty payout.
        
               | seanwilson wrote:
               | > A responsible person running such a linter does a
               | sanity check before taking their positive and bugging
               | someone else with it. An irresponsible one potentially
               | causes harm by assuming every single hit is a major
               | finding that should turn into a bounty payout.
               | 
               | I already tried to clarify that I was talking about the
               | general concept of good lint rules, not about people
               | emailing for bounty payouts. We're in agreement.
        
           | waihtis wrote:
           | Well according to the post, the OP returned a cheeky message
           | and any MK I Eyeball should clearly spot it as an intended
           | condition. Automated scan-spam gets on your nerves pretty
           | quickly.
           | 
           | I run a small vulnerability disclosure program and receive a
           | ton of it - people clearly run automated scanners, which I
           | presume create automated vulnerability reports, on things
           | that are not even remotely dangerous AND have been
           | specifically ruled out of scope for the program.
           | 
           | It's not helpful, it's time consuming and often people will
           | complain if you don't answer their reports.
        
           | ryanlol wrote:
           | This is not a helpful message in the vast majority of cases.
           | Lots of servers out there that always return 200
        
             | seanwilson wrote:
             | > Lots of servers out there that always return 200
             | 
             | That's poor configuration for most public websites that you
             | want indexed by search bots that's worth fixing. It's
             | called a soft 404, and makes it troublesome to detect when
             | links are invalid, break or have moved. Google will even
             | warn you about it: https://developers.google.com/search/doc
             | s/advanced/crawling/...
        
         | csnover wrote:
         | Be thankful you only receive automated security reports about
         | an open .git directory. There is some guy/company who goes
         | around running a web spider connected to some shitty antivirus
         | which automatically submits false abuse reports to site _ISPs_
         | claiming that their customers are hosting viruses. This
         | happened to me twice; I think after the second time my ISP
         | started rejecting these reports outright since I haven't seen
         | any new ones for a few years now, even though they're clearly
         | still at it (or, maybe, finally stopped last year after getting
         | DDoSed?)[0].
         | 
         | Automated security scanning by people who don't know what they
         | are doing has become an enormous hassle in so many ways and
         | really is damaging the ability to find and handle true threats.
         | 
         | [0]
         | https://twitter.com/badlogicgames/status/1267850389942042625
        
         | cperciva wrote:
         | Speaking of "security exploits" consisting of reading publicly
         | available information: Tarsnap has public mailing lists with
         | public mailing list archives, and at least once a month I get
         | an email warning me that my "internal emails" are accessible.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | Is there a way to return a custom 404 error handler for .git
         | and a different one for a regular 404 in Apache? Never tried
         | that before.
        
           | TonyTrapp wrote:
           | Check the ErrorDocument directive for .htaccess files.
        
             | hnlmorg wrote:
             | That directive doesn't have to reside in .htaccess files.
             | It works just as well inside a Directory, Virtual Host and
             | Server contexts as well.                   ErrorDocument
             | 404 /404.php                  <Directory "/.git">
             | ErrorDocument 404 "Ah ah ah! You didn't say the magic word"
             | </Directory>
             | 
             | https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#errordocume
             | n...
        
         | cipherboy wrote:
         | > I have a feeling CNAs are bringing this kind of low effort
         | zero regard for false positive fatigue bullshit to CVEs. Might
         | as well just rip that bandaid off now and stop trusting
         | anything besides the debian security mailing list.
         | 
         | Red Hat (my employer), Canonical, and SUSE are also CNAs. I can
         | only speak to ours, but I think our prodsec team does a great
         | job with the resources they've been given. Nobody is perfect,
         | but if you take the time to explain the problem (invalid CVE,
         | wrong severity, bad product assignment, ...) they consistently
         | take the time to understand the issue and will work with
         | whatever other CNA or reporter to fix it. Generally we have a
         | public tracker for unembargoed CVEs, so if it affects us and
         | isn't legitimate or scoped correctly, you might get somewhere
         | by posting there (or the equivalent on Ubuntu/SUSE's tracker).
         | 
         | Perhaps it is just the nature of the open source community
         | Linux distros are a part of, though, that lets them apply it to
         | CVEs as well.
         | 
         | Doesn't help with personal reports though. :-)
         | 
         | Curious, did you get CVE assignments against your personal
         | site? 0.o
        
         | Shank wrote:
         | This is quite common. If you run a security@ mailbox at a
         | company, you're bound to receive hundreds of bug
         | bounty/responsible disclosure requests because of known
         | software quirks or other design choices. They'll cite precisely
         | one CVE or HackerOne/BugCrowd report, and then proceed to
         | demand a huge payment for a critical security flaw.
         | 
         | I've seen reports that easily fail the airtight hatchway [0]
         | tests in a variety of ways. Long cookie expiration? Report.
         | _Any_ cookie doesn 't have `Secure`, including something like
         | `accepted_cookie_permissions`? Report. Public access to an
         | Amazon S3 bucket used to serve downloads for an app? Report.
         | WordPress installed? You'll get about 5 reports for things like
         | having the "pingback" feature enabled, having an API on the
         | Internet, and more.
         | 
         | The issue is that CVEs and prior-art bug bounty payments seem
         | "authoritative" and once they exist, they're used as reference
         | material for submitting reports like this. It teaches new
         | security researchers that the wrong things are vulnerabilities,
         | which is just raising a generation of researchers that look for
         | the entirely wrong things.
         | 
         | [0]:
         | https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060508-22/?p=31...
        
           | bostik wrote:
           | Yup, according to these "researchers" having robots.txt on
           | your website is enough to warrant a CRITICAL vulnerability.
           | 
           | No, I'm not joking. That's one of the reports I saw in
           | November. I've also had to triage the claim that our site
           | supposedly has a gazillion *.tar.xz files available at the
           | root. All because the 404 handler for random [non-production
           | relevant] paths is a fixed page with 200 response.
           | 
           | As far as I'm concerned, running a bulk vulnerability scanner
           | against a website and not even checking the results has as
           | much to do with security research as ripping wings off of
           | flies has to do with bioengineering.
        
             | wiredfool wrote:
             | Oh god. One client I work for does automated scans, and we
             | had an s3 bucket set up as a static site.
             | 
             | They freaked out when /admin/ returned permission errors,
             | essentially a 404, because it was information leakage about
             | admin functions of the website.
        
           | VectorLock wrote:
           | You're absolutely right I get a barrage of these. I've got to
           | think someone out there is selling software to scan for these
           | and spam them around.
        
           | STRML wrote:
           | Can confirm this; we've gotten more than 20 reports and
           | demands for bounties for "public access" on our open data
           | subdomain (backed by S3), which literally is `public.`.
           | 
           | Then they beg to have the report closed as "informative". We
           | don't comply unless it really is an honest mistake; I don't
           | like the idea of low-quality reporters evading consequences
           | again and again, sending scattershot bug reports in a
           | desperate attempt to catch a team not paying attention.
        
         | thaumasiotes wrote:
         | > I have a feeling CNAs are bringing this kind of low effort
         | zero regard for false positive fatigue bullshit to CVEs.
         | 
         | Yes, being the discoverer of a CVE is a major resume item. Pen
         | testers who have a CVE to their name can charge more. Companies
         | can charge more for sending them.
        
       | RyJones wrote:
       | We get dozens of "high-priority" security issues filed that are
       | resolved with "we're an open-source project; this information is
       | public on purpose".
       | 
       | Our bug bounty clearly outlines that chat, Jira, Confluence, our
       | website - all out-of-bounds. Almost all of our reports are on
       | those properties.
        
       | hannob wrote:
       | The whole problem is that at some point people started seeing
       | CVEs as an achievement, as "if I get a CVE it means I found a
       | REAL VULN". While really CVEs should just be seen as an
       | identifier. It means multiple people talking about the same vuln
       | know they're talking about the same vuln. It means if you read an
       | advisory about CVE-xxx-yyy you can ask the vendor of your
       | software if they already have a patch for that.
       | 
       | It simply says nothing about whether a vuln is real, relevant or
       | significant.
        
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