Hack has at least two definitions in a computing context.
- A nifty trick or shortcut that is useful. “Check out this hack to increase your productivity.”
- Accessigg something you shouldn’t. “They hacked into the database.”
A lot of times they sort of get used in conjunction to describe interesting ways to gain access to secure systems, but using it to describe accessing insecure things you shouldn’t is still a valid usage of the phrase.
That said I definitely wanna see the company face charges for this, this is insane.
No, this was a data leak. The word “hack” has legal implications and shifts the blame away from the company and onto the individual who discovered the leak.
Based on this comment alone, I am 100% sure that you are not a lawyer.
This is hilarious
I always get irrationally angry when i see python code using os.path instead of pathlib. What is this, the nineties?
And what’s with the string addition? Never heard of f-strings or even .format()?
Make a PR
Be the change you want to see in the world.
I absolutely despise Firebase Firestore (the database technology that was “hacked”). It’s like a clarion call for amateur developers, especially low rate/skill contractors who clearly picked it not as part of a considered tech stack, but merely as the simplest and most lax hammer out there. Clearly even DynamoDB with an API gateway is too scary for some professionals. It almost always interfaces directly with clients/the internet without sufficient security rules preventing access to private information (or entire database deletion), and no real forethought as to ongoing maintenance and technical debt.
A Firestore database facing the client directly on any serious project is a code smell in my opinion.
Ah yes, Firebase. The Google version of leaking all your company data through a public S3 bucket
I remember when they launched and started pushing it in the Android dev community. Actually won a Google Pixel at a Firebase sponsored hackathon in my town…after that I never touched Firestore again. Using that ACL language to restrict access, you could see the massive foot gun from a mile away
It’s like people learn how to make a phone app in React Native or whatever, but then come to the shocking and unpleasant realisation that a data-driven service isn’t just a shiny user interface - it needs a backend too.
But they don’t know anything about backend, and don’t want to, because as far as they are concerned all those pesky considerations like data architecture, availability, security, integrity etc are all just unwanted roadblocks on the path to launching their shiny app.
And so, when a service seemingly provides a way to build an app without needing to care about any of those things, of course they take it.
And I get it, I really do. The backend usually is the genuine hard part in any project, because it’s the part with all the risk. The part with all the problems. The place where everything can come crashing down or leak all your data if you make bad decisions. That’s the bothersome nature of data-driven services.
But that’s exactly why the backend is important, and especially the part you can’t build anything decent without thinking about.
I think it’s less about the tech picked and more about developers with no sense of security and a poor understanding of networking. I’ve seen far too many web applications where the developer needed some sort of database behind it (MySQL, PostGres, MSSQL) and so they stood up either a container or entire VM with a public IP and whatever the networking layer set to allow any IP to hit the database port. The excuse is almost always something like, “we needed the web front end to be able to reach the database, so we gave the database server/container a public IP and allowed access”. Which is wonderful, right up until half of the IP addresses in Russia start trying to brute force the database.
I agree that this is ultimately a problem with developers lacking security knowledge and general understanding, but my issue with Firestore specifically is that it is a powerful tool that, while it can be adopted as part of a carefully considered tech stack, lends itself most naturally towards being a blunt force instrument used by these kinds of developers.
My main criticism of Firestore is that it offers a powerful feature set that is both extremely attractive to amateur or constrained developers while simultaneously doing a poor job of guiding said amateurs towards creating a secure and well designed backend. In particular, the seemingly expected use case of the technology as something directly interfaced with by apps and other clients, as evidenced by the substantial support and feature set for this use case, is the main issue. This no-code no-management client driven interaction model makes it especially attractive to these developers.
This lack of indirection through an API Gateway or service, however, imposes additional design considerations largely delegated to the security rules which can easily be missed by a beginner. For example:
- Many examples of amateurs take an open-by-default approach, only applying access and write restrictions where necessary and miss data that should be restricted
- Some amateurs deploy databases with no access or write restrictions at all
- There is no way to only allow a “view” of a document to a request, instead a separate document and security rules containing the private fields needs to be created. This can be fairly simple to design around but seems to be a bit of a “gotcha”, plus if you have similar but non identical sets of data that needs to be accessible by different groups it must be duplicated and manually synchronized.
- Since there is no way to version data models, incompatible changes require complicated workarounds or an increasingly complicated deserialization process on the client side (especially as existing clients continue to write outdated models).
- Schema validation of data written by clients to the database is handled by security rules, which is seemingly unintuitive or missed by many developers because I’ve seen plenty of projects miss it
- If clients are writing data directly, it can become fairly complex to handle and subsequently maintain their contributions, especially if the aforementioned private data documents are required or the data model changes.
All of these pitfalls can be worked around (although I would still argue for some layer of indirection at least for writes), but at this point I’ve been contracted to 2 or 3 projects worked on by “professionals” (derogatory) that failed to account for any of these issues and I absolutely sick to death of it. I think a measure of a tools quality is whether it guides a developer towards good practices by design and I have found Firestore to completely fail in that regard. I think it can be used well, and it is perfectly appropriate for small inconsequential (as in data leaks would be inconsequential) single developer projects, but it almost never is.
sounds like firebase itself is a hack.
I’m honestly embarrassed by my fellow devs more often than not these days.
What the fuck happened to craftsmanship? Or taking pride in your work?
oh right, techbro startup culture garbage ended it.
Peak Vibe Coding results.
while True:
Jesus Christ
There’s nothing wrong with manually breaking a loop.
There’s nothing wrong with eating a banana with a knife and fork, either.
Except living with the shame.
eh
You know that’s not the Tea code, but the downloader, right?
Other reports state the Tea backend was Vibe Coded: https://www.ainvest.com/news/tea-app-data-breach-exposes-72-000-users-ai-generated-code-security-lapse-2507/
Sure, it might be, I’m not saying it isn’t. All I’m saying is: the screenshot shows the code someone wrote to download the images. It’s not part of the Tea codebase.
They’re also not using requests very efficiently, so who knows.
This reminds me of how I showed a friend and her company how to get databases from BLS and it’s basically all just text files with urls. “What API did you call? How did you scrape the data?”
Nah man, it’s just… there. As government data should be. They called it a hack.
ah yes, the forbidden curl hack
Believe it or not a lot of hacking is more like this than you think.
Security by obscurity.
If I was a hacker, I would just get a job as a night cleaning person at corporate office buildings. And then just help myself to the fucking post-it notes with usernames and passwords on them.
Social engineering is probably 95% of modern attack vectors. And that’s not even unexpected, some highly regarded computer scientists and security researchers concluded this more than a decade ago.
When the technical side reaches a certain level of security, the humans become the weakest link.
*if
We reached that part a long time ago.
Clearly the authors of this app did not. Hence “if.”
I work in security and I kinda doubt this. There are plenty of issues just like what is outlined here that would be much easier to exploit than social engineering. Social engineering costs a lot more than
GET /secrets.json.There is good reason to be concerned about both, but 95% sounds way off and makes it sound like companies should allocate significantly more time to defend against social engineering, when they should first try to ensure social engineering is the easiest way to exploit their system. I can tell you from about a decade of experience that it typically isn’t.
https://www.infosecinstitute.com/resources/security-awareness/human-error-responsible-data-breaches/
You’re right. It’s 74%.
https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/clorox-380-million-suit-cognizant-cyberattack/753837/
It’s way easier to convince someone that you are just a lost user who needs access than it is to try to probe an organization’s IT security from the outside.
This is only going to get worse with the ability to replicate other’s voices and images. People already consistently fall for text message and email social engineering. Now someone just needs to build a model off a CSO doing interviews for a few hours and then call their phone explaining there has been a breach. Sure, 80% of good tech professionals won’t fall for it, but the other 20% that just got hired out of their league and are fearing for their jobs will immediately do what they are told, especially if the breach is elaborate enough to convince them it’s an internal security thing.
Yes social engineering can be incredibly effective. I completely agree, but there is a bit of an obsession with it these days and imo it’s over indexed, because at the end of the day the type of social engineering detailed in that report typically just provides access.
In some cases, the target is important enough and has enough organizational power that accessing the network as them is sufficient, but that’s not often the case. What that means is that in those other cases social engineering (which in that report you cited is often just phishing) is providing, typically, internal network access. An attacker will have to move through the network and exploit software typically to continue their attack. There are many points in this chain that the weakness lies in software or configuration. If effort was placed on making those systems better it would likely see better results than hyper focusing on the social engineering, which is significantly more difficult to stop, especially with all of the things you mentioned on the horizon.
My point is then that even if it is a part of 74% of breaches, according to Verizon, it’s not necessarily sufficient and is often paired with software level exploits.
And I know this because my company does plenty of red teaming, and we use social engineering but at the end of the day the more interesting result comes from a software exploit or just abusing a weak configuration.
You are right and what some people miss is that social engineering being the vector to gain foothold doesn’t mean that it was sufficient to allow the breach. Almost always you need some other weakness (or a series of them). Except when the weaknesses are so had that you don’t need a foothold at all (like this case), or when the social engineering gives you everything (rare, but you might convince you someone to give you access to data etc.).
A whole separate conversation is deserved by how effective (or not) social engineering training is. Quite a few good papers about the topic came out in the last fee years.
This has been the case for 40+ years. Humans are almost always the weakest link.
we built this shit. thus we are always to blame.
The percentage is closer to 75% than 95%.
I think that’s less about “hacking” and more about modern day devs being overworked by their hot-shit team lead and clueless PMs and creating “temporary” solutions that become permanent in the long run.
This bucket was probably something they set up early in the dev cycle so they could iterate components without needing to implement an auth system first and then got rushed into releasing before it could be fixed. That’s almost always how this stuff happens; whether it’s a core element or a rushed DR test.
modern day devs being overworked
And then there is meningspunktet.dk which had all the time in the world to do whatever they wanted, and even get their hosting paid for by a university. They still leaked everyones email, phone, full legal name and location on day one and only fixed it because I pointed it out.
Thanks for the writeup - I can’t believe they claimed anything about keeping data safe while building the website so poorly…
Many years ago, I discovered that my then-employer’s “home built” e-commerce system had all user and admin passwords displayed in plaintext at home/admin/passwords.
When I brought this to the attention of leadership, they called the “developer” in and he said “oh, well, that’s IP locked, so no one on the web can access it!” When I pulled it up on my phone, he insisted my phone was on the work WiFi, despite it being clearly verifiable that was not the case. (The same work WiFi that had an open public connection, which is the one my phone would have been on, if it were on it…)
He did fix that, but many other issues remained. Eventually a new COO hired someone competent as his ‘backup’, replaced our website and finally suggested he pursue other employment opportunities before he could no longer voluntarily pursue them. (There was concern he might sabotage.)
Shodan lists 100’000s of publicly accessible security cameras.
Securing the db is more of an ops thing.
AI just enables the shit programmers to create a greater volume of shit
I’ll tape this to my office door.
I remember when a senior developer where i worked was tired of connecting to the servers to check its configuration, so they added a public facing rest endpoint that just dumped the entire active config, including credentials and secrets
That was a smaller slip-up than exposing a database like that (he just forgot that the config contained secrets) but still funny that it happened
That’s not a “senior developer.” That’s a developer that has just been around for too long.
Secrets shouldn’t be in configurations, and developers shouldn’t be mucking around in production, nor with production data.
Yeah the whole config thing in that project was an eldritch horror of a legacy, too ingrained in both the services and tooling to be modified without massive rewrites
I would have put IP address access restrictions on that at the very least. I may have even done something like that more than once for various tools in the past.
That way it acts completely open to people (or other servers) in the right places and denies all knowledge to anything else.
What was the BASE_URL here? I’m guessing that’s like a profile page or something?
So then you still first have to get a URL to each profile? Or is this like a feed URL?
It’s a public firebase bucket
Oh Jesus
That should be criminally negligent.
🤦♂️
Possibly from the decompiled APK. 404media reported that they found the same URL as the posted one in the APK (archive link).
Disabling index and making the names UUID would make the directory inviolable even if the address was publicly available.
Bet you could reuse/keep UUIDs for someone/stuff that gets updated and get that new data even if you “shouldn’t”.
It could work in theory but in practice there are always a billion things that go wrong IMO.
Security through obscurity never works.
It’s not security through obscurity in this case. The filenames can’t be obtained or guessed through brute force. At least not with current technology or processing power…
Security through obscurity is when you hide implementation details.
Saying that my suggestion is security through obscurity is the same as telling that ASLR is security through obscurity…
Sounds like a good case for brute forcing the filenames. Just do the proper thing and don’t leave your cloud storage publicly accessible.
While proper security is better, you’re not gonna brute force UUIDs.
As long as you’re not rate limited, you absolutely could.
A UUID v4 has 122 bits of randomness. Do you know how long that would take to brute-force, especially with network limitations?
It taking a long time doesn’t make it an impossibility. The fact that it has a limit of 122 bits, in and of itself, makes the possibility of a bruteforce a mathematical guarantee.
By this logic, all crypto is bruteforcable, on a long enough timeline.
A 122 bit random number is 5316911983139663491615228241121378303 possible values. Even if it were possible to check 1 trillion records per second, it would take 168598173000000000 years to check all the UUIDs and get the info on all the users. Even if every human on earth signed up for the app (~8 billion people), and you wanted to just find any one valid UUID, the odds of a generating a UUID and that being valid in their DB is basically 0. You can do the math your self following the Birthday Paradox to determine how many times you would need to guess UUIDs before the probability that any one UUID is valid against a population of the whole world is greater than 50%.
You should read into the NSA’s Translator. Granted, it’s relatively outdated with shifting text algorithms, but for a very long time (about half a century), it was able to bruteforce any key, regardless of length, in under an hour.
For all practical purposes, it’s impossible.
It’s not, though. And thinking that it is impossible is why DES, for example, was “translatable” by the NSA for decades. Never assume something is impossible just because it’s difficult.
You cannot!
I cannot. But the bruteforce is a mathematical guarantee.
And has nothing to do with my proposition.
Can’t be done.
who’d have thought that javascript and client side programming was incredibly susceptible to security flaws and deeply unsafe
As much as I dislike JavaScript, it isn’t responsible for this. The person (or AI) and their stupidity is.
When i tried making a website with gemini cli it did deadass use string interpolation for sql queries so everything is possible
Robert’); DROP TABLE Students; –
aw bobby
but it didn’t help; it was basically the gasoline
In what way?
who’d have thought that being shitty programmer was incredibly susceptible to security flaws and deeply unsafe instead of javascript
No, it must be JavaScript that is the problem
principal_skinner.jpg.exe
Microsoft defender identified a malware in this executable.
Wow. It actually identified something?
Even the best models fine tuned for coding still have training that was based on both good and bad examples of programming from humans. And since it’s not AGI but using probability to generate the code, you’re going to get crap programming logic dependent on how often such things were used and suggested by humans to other humans. Googling for an answer on how to code something pulls up all sorts of answers from many sources, but reading through them, many are terrible. An LLM doesn’t know that, it just knows that humans liked some answers better than others, so GIGO.
Gorilla In Gorilla Out?
Giraffe In Giraffe Out
Gorilla In Giraffe Out
That would be the real trick.
Fantastic for building BaaS apps
Bullshit as a Service?
Bananas as a Service :)
bananas in pyjamas
Sounds like a good time
Does anyone have a source for this?
The original article is paywalled (I mean, registration-walled?), this summary is not
404 Media reported that 4chan users claimed to be sharing personal data and selfies from Tea after discovering an exposed database.
