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Company Gets 45,000 Bad Facebook Reviews After Teenaged Hacker's Unjust Arrest (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer:
Over 45,000 users have left one-star reviews on a company's Facebook page after the business reported a security researcher to police and had him arrested in the middle of the night instead of fixing a reported bug. The arrest took place this week in Hungary after an 18-year-old found a flaw in the online ticket-selling system of Budapesti Közlekedési Központ, Budapest's public transportation authority. The young man discovered that he could access BKK's website, press F12 to enter the browser's developer tools mode, and modify the page's source code to alter a ticket's price. Because there was no client or server-side validation put in place, the BKK system accepted the operation and issued a ticket at a smaller price...
The teenager -- who didn't want his name revealed -- reported the issue to BKK, but the organization chose to contact the police and file a complaint, accusing the young man of hacking their systems... BKK management made a fatal mistake when they brazenly boasted in a press conference about catching the hacker and declaring their systems "secure." Since then, other security flaws in BKK's system have surfaced on Twitter. As details of the case emerged, public outrage grew against BKK and its manager Kálmán Dabóczi, especially after it was revealed that BKK was paying around $1 million per year for maintenance of its IT systems, hacked in such a ludicrously simple manner.
The teenager -- who didn't want his name revealed -- reported the issue to BKK, but the organization chose to contact the police and file a complaint, accusing the young man of hacking their systems... BKK management made a fatal mistake when they brazenly boasted in a press conference about catching the hacker and declaring their systems "secure." Since then, other security flaws in BKK's system have surfaced on Twitter. As details of the case emerged, public outrage grew against BKK and its manager Kálmán Dabóczi, especially after it was revealed that BKK was paying around $1 million per year for maintenance of its IT systems, hacked in such a ludicrously simple manner.
Never try to help souless corporation.
"would of" How do people still make this mistake? Do you just never read?
That press conference was the equivalent of doing a presentation in front of your class on dressing modestly with your fly open.
The manager(s) who authorized that embarrassment should be fired first thing tomorrow morning because they're clearly clueless bureaucrats that don't even understand their own department's responsibilities.
While I agree with this sentiment, proper journalism presents the facts and lets the reader decide if it's just or not.
I guess security researchers and hackers now learned a lesson.
Find a bug? Exploit the f**k out of it. Don't bother reporting it.
...for your own reviewing and commenting enjoyment: https://www.facebook.com/bkkbu...
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
None should, that's not to say they don't. I worked for a company a while back that was dipping its toes into the google web toolkit, which allows you to write your web page's UI in Java and then converts it to Javascript. They ended up doing all their authentication on the client side, so you could just make a web request to the backend and create arbitrary users in any organization in the billing system. That included administrative users. When I reported it, the team writing the code said something to the effect of "You're just making calls to the backend! No one would ever do that!" That attitude is surprisingly prevalent in the industry.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I control the client. It does what ever I want. The Server should have no expectation of my behavior, it just expects a string of 0s and 1s. The server is asking how many tickets I want and how much I should pay for them. This kid pointed out that the server is trusting the client to tell it what the correct price is. The client is being dishonest if it lies about the price but this isn't like changing the price stickers, here the server is actually asking the client for the price and this 18 year old pointed it out. He bought a ticket that he never intended to use to demo the bug. True, his demo might have caused an error in the backend accounting that could have brought down the entire BKK system. That is generally why you ask permission before hacking something, but this seems so trivial that I would give the kid a break and I would expect him to get a thanks.
A network glitch turns this into 128 tickets, and the server charges your card for 128 tickets.
Umm, No.
TCP/IP (specifically the transport layer) handles packet integrity. What gets sent is what is delivered or nothing at all. Client side validation's only purpose is to ensure that the user is informed when they have entered invalid information so that they can correct their mistake. If you are trying to use it any other way, I hope you are not a professional web developer.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
I found a bug in the website of a company I wanted to order tiles from; but because of the vagaries of the website, I wasn't actually sure it was a bug until I'd placed the order and had it delivered at a 90+% discount.
Normally their prices were placed in £ per square meter, but they sold individual "sample" tiles for a reduced price. In this case I'd ordered a number of sample tiles and then decided the one I wanted. Rather than go through the website and search for the name again, I went to the "My orders" section of the page and clicked the tile I had decided to order. Conveniently, they had a "Order more" button on that page, so I clicked it.
Now, the price per square meter was £30, and the price of a single sample tile was £2.50. When I clicked "Order more", my basket showed a single number ("1") with a unit price of £2.50 -- but no description of what the unit was. I changed the count to 18 (the number of square meters I wanted) and clicked "Update price", and it was set to £45. But was I ordering 18 individual sample tiles for £45 (which would also have been a bug -- you're only supposed to be able to order one at a time), or 18 square meters of tiles? And anyway, surely some check at the other end would stop it if it really were a mistake, right?
Nope. Three days later a palate containing 18 square meters of tiles showed up -- £720 of goods for £45 + shipping.
I was at that point genuinely torn between wanting to DTRT and being afraid of this sort of reaction described in this article. I did write them an email, spinning the whole thing as an accident, and they simply asked me to pay the difference up to the actual price of the tiles, with a 15% discount.
Being well into adulthood rather than a teenager probably helped; as well (probably) as being an actual customer who was purchasing their product, rather than someone clearly identifying themselves as trying to break in to their systems.
Hope they got their website fixed -- the company overall is a good company, and I'd be sad to see them lose money because they were good at tiles and bad at javascript.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Since I'm a local, let me also add this for the human resources aspect of the story:
Another reason for the hurried introduction of the inscure, unfinished BKK online ticket sales system was that the Mr. Kalman Daboczy, whom the referenced article mentioned by name, is not the original leader of BKK.
Before him there was David Vitezy, an admittedly weird, but very bright, internationally educated jewish boy, who got to form and lead the BKK at a young age, solely due to his family's high political connections yet turned out to be highly motivated. In a few years Vitezy introduced a computerized schedule-control system called FUTAR for over 1500 buses which revolutionized on-timeliness in circulation, a quantum leap from the paper-based BKV era and welcomed by all pax.
He also introduced private sub-contracting for bus line operations with run-time based financing, which brought in hundreds of brand new low floor, low pollution Merc and Volvo vehicles to Budapest, where previously only Cold War era (!) left-over smoking wreckages circulated. He managed to extend the lenght of the city's most important tram line and furnish it with modern rolling stock by successfully claiming EU funds for development, which was considered impossible to get by all parties. He created a public bicycle-sharing system called BUBI from zero and integrated it with BKK. Genius, I'd say.
Eventually Vitezy was sacked from BKK as he tried to reform traffic light patterns and lane use rights to prioritize bus and tram circulation versus private cars, which limousine-riding politicians vetoed. Mr. Daboczy, who replaced him is a "mameluk" i.e. a person whose only skill is loyalty to political superiors in executing orders without questions, including hurtful or stupid ones, and he is without creative talent. Ever since BKK has been stagnating and the city's population eventually questioned why no public transit development happens since Vitezy left? Thus the online ticket selling system was kind of an attempt to show off the new leadership's competence but it backfired spectacularly. The opposition is now demanding Daboczy's removal from BKK due to the scandal.
BTW, when David Vitezy was sacked from BKK, the Port Authority of New York reportedly tried to woo him over to advise on future plans for public transport development in the skyscraper city. He declined to emigrate, probably the mistake of his life, as ever since he has been given mere "desk by the window" roles in Hungary. I'd say if he'd left for USA, maybe in 15 years he could have been properly groomed in America and come back as a potential future PM of Hungary. That, provided the russians don't conquer our country again in the meanwhile...