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Microsoft Tries To Censor Bing Vulnerability
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Bing search engine has a vulnerability with its cash-back promotion, which impacts both merchants and customers. In traditional Microsoft fashion, the company has responded to the author of the breaking Bing cash-back exploit with a cease & desist letter, rather than by fixing the underlying security problem. It is possible for a malicious user to create fake Bing cash-back requests, resulting in not only fake cash-back costs for the merchant, but also blocking legitimate customers from receiving their cash-back from Bing. The original post is currently available in Bing's cache, although perhaps not for long. But no worries, the author makes it clear that the exploit should be painfully obvious to anyone who reads the Bing cash-back SDK."
it will probably be all over the rest of the internet and general common knowledge within the week.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I'm curious how 'anonymous reader' knows that Microsoft is doing nothing to fix the problem. This has been bugging me for a long time. Its possible that a workable solution could take some time to get implemented, and in that time, doesn't it make sense to send a C&D letter in the interim? Hell, doesn't it make sense to send the letter anyways, so you don't have all these assholes trying to break your system? A C&D letter doesn't mean that other actions haven't been taken. Just a thought.
It seems like people have still not learned to never trust anything from the user. This reminds me of some trivially exploitable web merchants years ago. The would store the entire shopping basket, including prices, in the user's cookies. User simply modifies their cookies so that everything costs $1 or $0.01 and they could order a dozen cpus / t-shirts / whatever for a few bucks.
is the line from the letter
"cease and desist the posting in any location of the material and information contained in this post"
Seeing as it is their SDK that contains the details of this "feature", are they going to send themselves a C&D and then pull the SDK?
Regarding the tracking pixel approach: H.L. Mencken once wrote, "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong." I cannot think of a situation to which this sentiment better applies.
After about 30 years is this still news?
Use Microsoft software and you get screwed. They don't design software they design the user interface and botch the software. They are now as always a marketing not an IT company. It's always been that way, it will always be that way.
Seems pretty spot-on to me.
If anyone is quickly wondering exactly where he got the info to construct the request URL in his original post (like, how did he know about jftid, jfoid, and jfmid?), it looks like page 33 of the linked Integration Guide PDF gives the URL https://ssl.bing.com/cashback/javascripts/1x1tracking.js. That JavaScript file has info on constructing that URL.
If you have a glaring vulnerability that lets people defraud your customers out of arbitrary amounts of money, the only sane thing to do is immediately disable the feature. Not wait for a solution. Not cover up the issue. You make coverage of the issue irrelevant. If one person figured it out and wrote about it, 100 other people also figured it out and are using it for personal gain.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
All Microsoft needed to do was include a Message Authentication Code (such as, say, HMAC-SHA1) in the tracking image URL. Microsoft and the merchant obviously already have a shared secret they can use for the purpose. Using a MAC would have been practically free.
Given what Microsoft pays its programmers, I'm just appalled that nobody thought to include basic precautions in a brand-new interface written in this day and age. Whoever wrote the Bing API specification really should have known better.
http://lkcl.net/reports/bing.censorship.attempt - additional mirrors will be added as i find them.
Just interested in keeping the extra income 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
This is no more a cheat than taking someone's money for a shell game and showing them afterwards how they were scammed.
If he's said "by the way, I managed to get 20 grand off you by this" then he's not defrauded them. If he'd kept quiet THEN he'd have defrauded them.
This is called "fraud". Look it up. It's been around for a long time, a lot longer than HTTP. There are standard business practices for dealing with it. Not all of them are technical. This system's technical defenses are probably sufficient to raise an alarm (delayed by a few weeks as the results are collated), and it will produce a pretty good paper trail leading to the owner of the Bing account. Some of the systems take into account minor details such as the existence of accountants, a police force, a paper trail, and a legal system. Obviously some stronger technical measures might have made it a bit more difficult to pull off this partucular fraud, or maybe it might have even stopped it, but the non-technical measures will also work just fine if they are called into play.
Whether or not the door is obviously guarded, it's still illegal to steal stuff from a store. The fact that the door was not protected with the latest and greatest in RFID theft detection systems doesn't change the fact that what you are doing is illegal. And perhaps the tracking process is slower than what you see in movies, people still get tracked down and arrested, days or weeks after the event. Moving from the streets onto the Internet doesn't really change the rules much (except that your case will probably wind up with Federal jurisdiction).
In this case, the poor "hacker" (I wish him/her luck!) appears to have done the following:
1. Used a specially formatted HTTP request to get a small fabricated purchase to show up as credited to his/her Bing account.
2. Noticed that the cash back did show up with no problem as "available for withdrawal".
3. Tried again with a much larger purchase. Again the purchase shows up in his account.
4. Hacker is hoping that the amount will soon become available for withdrawal.
On the other side of the world, the accounting systems for Microsoft and the associated merchant have likely compared invoices and noticed the discrepancies. The small ones got noted, but they were thrown out as "somebody is playing with the system, but it's not worth dealing with it". But this month, when going over the books, they're going to find a nice big 100,000 item that doesn't match up with any purchase recorded on the store's official records. However, they do have the account number of the buyer that should be getting the cash back. I'm not sure what typically happens at this point, but it probably involves cancelling dinner for the wolf pack so that by the time they're ready to send out the posse, the wolves are hungry.
In this case, Microsoft has apparently (I haven't looked into this) provided an API by which a store can report a sale and attribute the sale to a particular Bing account. The API has varying levels of security, depending on how much effort the store wants to put into preventing fake transactions from entering the system. Low effort might be fine and takes less time to set up, but it's easier to attack and that means more work to do when reconciling the accounts. Just like many other mechanisms for quickly distributing non-critical information between merchants, this isn't meant to be the authoritative information transmission system, just a way for people to keep status on accounts in between the regularly-scheduled account reconciliations. This way Bing can update your account balance within seconds of the purchase. Of course, the payback won't happen until they've gone back and checked Microsoft's records against the merchant's records and pulled out any differences. The differences go to the auditor and possibly to the police or FBI.
Could we maybe just think for a second before acting like jerks? Being a jerk means everybody suffers. I mean, just because I see a way to deface somebody's website doesn't mean I am obligated to do so. I walk by 100 cars a day, and I could easily spray shaving cream all over them and not get caught. But if everybody did that, quality of life would go down for everybody. Same thing on the internet.
I hate this attitude out there th
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Seriously.... they couldn't possibly assume that their affiliates can program, so the key would have to be in the users' web browser instead of on the affiliates' server.
Your car has an exploit, so I stole it and drove it into a wall to prove a point.
This is my sig.
Microsoft has posted this page in response:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=bing+cashback+vulnerability&go=&form=QBLH&filt=all&qs=n
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
What bing vulnerability?
Again, owning up does not stop it being a crime. I could send a letter to the bank saying they have problems with their security set up, come back a few days later, rob them, send a letter telling them I had indeed robbed them. Do you really think I wouldn't get arrested? Even if I went back a few days and gave them their money back I'd still be arrested.
Inaction by the victim is not permission, an unlocked door is not permission. This is an unauthorised attempt to abuse a system to knowingly trick someone out of their money. It is fraud.
You are a funny boy! To misquote David Pogue, Microsoft will lose when businesses decide that computers are no longer useful.
It's good to have more than one ecosystem out there. There's every chance that the engineers at Microsoft knew about this vulnerability and, in the interests of simplification, decided to allow it for business reasons. Those happen sometimes ;). Credit card companies could engage mechanisms that would make it MUCH more difficult to do fraudulent charges against a card, but they elect not to because they don't want to impose a "drag" on sales of any kind. They're clearly calculated that their losses from "drag" would exceed their losses from fraud.
And yet he successfully highlighted the issue of questionable ID checks around the palace and got it published in almost all the media without causing any pain or distress to anyone other than the embarrassed security staff. All the police said was that lives were never in danger at that party.
He achieved this through (largely) ethical methods. He could have possibly gone in with a bomb strapped to his chest, detonated it and sent a very strong message to security staff. However he didn't.
Using your comparison. He would have acheived acceptable results just abusing the system to give himself 6c. Instead he chose to strap a bomb to his chest and steal thousands, causing real hurt to victims. Just like the palace guests aren't to blame for the security, the businesses hurt by this aren't to blame for Bing's lack of security.
Don't drop the soap, if you do, don't bend over to pick it up. Don't look people in the eyes, and plead no-contest.
Lots of people are screaming "Wire Fraud" about this but I don't buy it. Microsoft needs to be accountable for their lack of security. They cost the world Billions of dollars (lost productivity plus value of the anti-virus/removal industry) because they're the leaders of a mentality where rushing products out the door is preferable to more reliable measures.
I mean... blame the person who exploited the crappy security all you want... but if Microsoft doesn't stop the $2k deposit from going into his account I don't think laws should give them a leg to stand-on. One poster noted that Microsoft probably has a team to review these large charges and I would agree that they do have resources to manually stop this large payment.
But if they don't stop it... well if MUST be more profitable to make that choice because Microsoft is a very, very smart business and they have historically made very, very ballsy and successful business decisions. So, as long as valuable taxpayer dollars don't get wasted on the case of whether it's morally right to exploit Microsoft for personal gain, I don't think there's much to talk about here. BUT if this becomes a court battle (Unreliable, Cheap Software v. John Doe) I hope the Unreliable, Cheap Software loses.
It really doesn't matter. Seems like the dumber the m$oft coder, the more people migrate to it. You can't fix stupid.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Developers make tactical & strategic errors, entire companies do the same and sometimes the response is poorly handled when either is caught ... yadda, yadda, yadda. Let's not dwell on a common-place phenomenon inherent to humans. What causes me the most concern is the QA/QC that should catch this sort of thing is failing. That's the larger problem to me. What buffoon, and presumably somebody senior was responsible for oversight of the review process, was responsible for looking at a tracking-pixel based mechanism and letting it pass muster? What other responsibilities does this joker have in Redmond?
Again, owning up does not stop it being a crime. I could send a letter to the bank saying they have problems with their security set up, come back a few days later, rob them, send a letter telling them I had indeed robbed them. Do you really think I wouldn't get arrested? Even if I went back a few days and gave them their money back I'd still be arrested.
Yes, but stopping before a crime has been committed does stop it from being a crime. Here is a better anology: He goes into a bank and makes out a withdrawal slip for $1,000,000 when he has only $100 in his account. He takes it up to the teller who gets $1,000,000 out of the safe and puts it on the counter. He then turns to everyone in the room, loudly says, "wow these people are gullible" and leaves without touching the money.
They might be able to get him under a computer crime statute (not that they should), but suggesting intent to fraud when it was he who made sure they would never send him the money is not rational.
I swear. Moderators can't read a /sarcasm tag anymore?
Posting anonymously, for obvious reasons....
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
My point is that Bing is a web service, and even if you had access to see their code, you couldn't just go onto their serves and fix it for them. So whether or not they use open source code is irrelevant to the end user.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Only gov'ts can censor. This is concealing.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!