Microsoft 0-day feud escalates as researcher threatens another exploit dump

rekabis

I may not have seen the full story - and I am cognizant of this - but what I have seen so far puts me solidly on the side of Nightmare Eclipse. Microsoft is making all indications that it is behaving like a colossal dick. It’s not a good look. As always: if you find yourself in a deep hole, stop digging.

rolph

there are active forks, and active mitigations for redsun undefend and bluehammer. so far as i can tell yellowkey is problematic, as the exploit takes advantage of a backdoor that ms needs, to "manage" your computer. only recently has a OOB mitigation been offered https://www.techspot.com/news/112410-security-researcher-mic...

8cvor6j844qw_d6

> “CVD is a two-way street,” he said. “The vendor has some responsibility as well, so to go out publicly stating this person violated CVD without showing any of the correspondence seems bold.” > “It confusingly claims their program ‘ensures researchers are compensated and publicly acknowledged’ in a statement answering a researcher who says he got neither,” Well said.

ChrisArchitect

Related: GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315968

45ahgd

This is poor damage control by Microslop. Why would the researcher publish valuable exploits without trying to get a bounty? Usually, when an individual is that upset, the group or corporation is wrong and tries to shape public perception by lying. Since when is publishing zero days a crime anyway? Shame on Microslop for these intimidation tactics. The real crime is vibe coding operating systems.

midtake

Sorry not sorry

this_user

At the end of the day, Microsoft won't care how bad any of this will make them look. Their reputation has been abysmal for decades, but none of it actually seems to have any kind of negative effect on their bottom line.

rustyhancock

I know this is a crazy take. But I go feel so down trodden by many many tech corps these days I find it hard not to have a smidge of satisfaction for this guy pointing out the colossal favour research developers do for them by responsible disclosure. That said, I feel bad for the inevitable victims of exploitation and also I am certain he will end up criminalized or as per usual the law will enforce a large corps will against him. Yes. Definitely a Friday night after a hard week take.

throwaway763210

Responsible disclosure isn't a law, it's a norm vendors invented and lean on when it suits them. Nothing legally requires you to report to a vendor first. Full disclosure and non disclosure are a valid choice as well. Maybe Microsoft should spend less energy threatening researchers and more on not shipping the slop code in the first place.

themafia

> “We remain firmly opposed to these actions, and any disclosure outside proper coordination that could harm our customers and the digital ecosystem,” Precisely. /Your/ customers. I have no obligation to them and you profit handsomely from them. I'm not sure you can use "opposition" as a strategy to ameliorate your own negligence followed by inaction.

chasil

The best interests of the customers of Microsoft is an immediate apology, a payment of at least $100,000, and a signed agreement pledging that no (further) legal action will be taken. The denial of Microsoft is just as harmful as the exploits of these flaws.

cryo32

I've been working with Microsoft products since about 1989. It has been mostly miserable, like living with a schizophrenic gorilla. You wake up in the morning and don't know how fucked your day is going to be. Dealing with them has been absolutely impossible even when you were one of their "gold" tier partners back in the day. I hope the promise of a July 14th threat goes as planned. They need to hurt. And everyone needs to see the risks they are taking by using their products.

codedokode

I read a little about BitLocker. It seems to store the encryption key in TPM and acquire it automatically after boot. I wonder, can encryption key be extracted by inserting a rogue PCIe card and reading it from memory, or by inserting a rogue DDR memory card with a backdoor to read the key from it, or by sniffing CPU - TPM bus?

aidenn0

I wonder: what's the approximate market value on the bugs so far released?

zingababba

Watching Microsoft squirm is always peak

Hikikomori

Hey MSRC. Maybe don't ban security researchers and then complain about vulnerabilities not being disclosed to you? Have you tried not fucking yoursef?

gslepak

It's poor form to publish exploits like this but Microsoft not paying their bounty is also poor form, and so is attempting to exploit the legal system to defend Microsoft's "right" to write buggy code.

rileymat2

It is not all about money, but microsoft had a net income of 101 billion last year, and a 36% profit margin. I am not saying humans or AI can create "perfect" software, but NASA has shown there is a HUGE gap between what can be achieved and what commercial software has generally done. We have given software a pass on the liability for the damage it can caused when it is defective for too long, that's the only way to change this, it must hit the bottom line.

fsckboy

this is from 2010 but says that microsoft was not going to pay bug bounties https://www.computerworld.com/article/1510124/microsoft-no-m... did they start to do that at some point, or is this a pressure (blackmail?) campaign to get the to do that? I have no love for, but rather hate for, Microsoft, so I'm not suggesting blackmail in the sense of defending them, but it's something they could claim. this is on Microsoft's website, they don't promise much for CVD https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/cvd

bink

Responding to bug bounty reports is a thankless job. Especially these days it's a flood of AI spam, language barriers, "pay me first", incomplete reports, huge egos, and people who think every find should be treated as a critical vulnerability. The people who handle these reports often do so after-hours or on holidays. In smaller companies they're also often the ones who manage the triage, patching, testing, and security release process. In larger companies they have to find owners for every line of code and convince those code owners of the severity (often knowing that neither or them will be rewarded for doing the work). All it takes is one wrong person to be assigned as a report comes in, a person who doesn't understand the real value of a bounty program, or one person having a bad day to completely ruin a company's reputation. It seems like that might have happened here (of course MS has done this before so who knows if it'll matter in the end). Microsoft needs to be completely transparent and to do so immediately. They should, with the reporters permission, release all communications. They can exclude technical details if patches aren't available yet. Doing anything less is going to prevent a lot of people from using their bounty program in the future and we'll all be worse off for it. They almost certainly made a mistake and they need to own up to it.