Comment by just_another_person@lemmy.world on Authy got hacked, and 33 million user phone numbers were stolen

Yeah. They got data in a way that was not intended. That’s a hack. It’s not always about subverting something by clickity-clacking like in the movies.

Well…you son of a birch…now I’m in.

Understanding that’s your reference, mine is that in Hackers they never said “I’m in” ;)

What about Sneakers? Or maybe The Net?

If it’s not in those surely it must have been in NCIS a few dozen times.

You name it, we got it!

Exploit. The system worked as intended, just without a rate limit. A hack would be relying on a vulnerability in the software to make it not function as programmed.

It’s the difference between finding a angle in a game world that causes your character to climb steeper than it should, vs rewriting memory locations to no-clip through everything. One causes the system to act in a way that it otherwise wouldn’t (SQL injections, etc) – the other, is using the system exactly as it was programmed.

Downloading videos from YouTube isn’t “Hacking” YouTube. Even though it’s using the API in a way it wasn’t intended. Right-clicking a webpage and viewing the source code isn’t hacking - even if the website you’re looking at doesn’t want you looking at the source.

Exploiting is hacking, quit being pedantic.

A system fault is not the same as a vulnerability. These would have different baseline CVSS 3.1 scores, with the temporal and environmental reducing over time. A medium/low at best for a public endpoint exposing PII.

Hacking is the entire process including figuring out if something is or is not rare limited

Sure. Except you’re wrong and have absolutely idea of what people in this community say about things. Let me be a dick and literally googz this for you and find an embarassing answer because you couldn’t do it yourself.

So your googling proved him right. What’s embarrassing about being right?

They gained unauthorized access. From that guys definition that is a hack, no an exploit

But they are using a loophole to gain sensitive data. They did not gain unauthorised access to the system.

They absolutely gained unauthorized access to the data. Their access was not intended or sanctioned. If it was intended to be public and accessible like it was, this wouldn’t be a story and they wouldn’t have locked down the access.

A missing rate limit is a vulnerability, or a weakness, depending on the definition. You’re playing smart without having an idea of what you’re talking about. Here you go:

https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/799.html

YouTube videos are public, and as such it’s not really hacking. If you were able to download private videos, for example, it would be a vulnerability like “Improper Access Control”. It does not matter in the least whether you use an “exploit” in your definition (which is wrong) or “just increment the video ID”.

The result is a breach of confidentiality, and as such this is to be classified as a “hack”.

With due respect, you are wrong.

hack

…

(transitive, slang, computing) To hack into; to gain unauthorized access to (a computer system, e.g., a website, or network) by manipulating code

Hacking means gaining unauthorized access to a computer system by manipulating or exploiting its code.

Wiktionary

Exactly what this is. Read the disclosure. What about your response doesn’t fit that?

They did not do it by manipulating code. This wasn’t the result of a code vulnerability. If you leave the door wide open with all your stuff out for the entire neighbourhood to see, you can’t claim you were “broken into”. Similarly, if you don’t secure your endpoints, you can’t claim you were “hacked”.

Lack of rate limiting is a code vulnerability if we are talking about an API endpoint.

Not that discussion makes any sense at all…

Also, “not securing” doesn’t mean much. Security is not a boolean. They probably have some controls, but they still have a gap in the lack of rate limiting.

It is a vulnerability, but exploiting that vulnerability is not generally considered by security experts to be “hacking” in the usual meaning of that term in academic settings. Using an open or exposed API, even one with a sign that says “don’t abuse me”, is generally not considered hacking.

I am a security professional. I would personally not care less to make the distinction, as both are very generic terms that are used very liberally in the industry.

So I don’t see any reason not to call this hacking. This was not an intended feature. It was a gap, which has been used to perform things that the application writer did not intended (not in this form). If fits with the definition of hacking as far as I can tell. In any case, this is not an academic discussion, it is a security advisory or an article that talks about it.

Well from a professional here: It is.

Please provide a link to whatever source claims this.

I hold a computer science degree and this contradicts the definition of “hack” versus “exploit” used in academic settings.

They probably typed it out themself then screenshotted it.

Hint – by manipulating or exploiting its code

Which I am explaining, they…did…not…do…

They did nothing to the code. They didn’t break the code, they didn’t cause the code to do anything it wasn’t designed to do. They did not exploit any code. They used an API endpoint that was in the open. For its intended purpose, to verify phone numbers. The api verified phone numbers, they verified phone numbers with the api. The only thing they did here…was they did verification on a lot of phone numbers.

They absolutely exploited unintended functionality. If this was intended, they wouldn’t have added rate limiting and locked down the api after. It was clear to say this was certainly not an intended use of the api.

In a video game for example, if there is a an item that caused excessive lagging just by placing the item. Placing a lot of them with the intent to lag the game would be an exploit. They only used items sanctioned by the game, but for unintended reasons and they would likely be banned for exploitation.

You’re arguing with someone who was agreeing with you 😑

You are correct, I replied to the wrong comment

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Authy got hacked, and 33 million user phone numbers were stolen(appleinsider.com)

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