• kitnaht@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    ‘hacked’. Eh. There was an API endpoint left open that allowed them to basically just spam it with no rate limiting. They used the lack of a rate limit to just pull the data out of the API that it was made to produce.

    • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • kitnaht@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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          4 months ago

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

        • 0xD@infosec.pub
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          4 months ago

          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”.

          • ___@lemm.ee
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            4 months ago

            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.

        • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          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.

              • stephen01king@lemmy.zip
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                4 months ago

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

                • Guest_User@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  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.

    • Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      That’s what most exploit-based hacks are. A developer makes a dumb mistake and then someone exploits it to do something they shouldn’t be able to do.