What Happened to HackerOne?

(blog.teknogeek.io)

67 points | by hipparchus 1 hour ago

8 comments

  • paradox460 14 minutes ago
    Sending the sales team on a paid vacation to a tropical paradise while the engineering product flounders is such a perfect representation of corporate rot it sounds like something out of a Mike Judge movie
  • tptacek 13 minutes ago
    Not only was there significant personal liability, but there had been multiple instances of hackers being criminally charged and sentenced to jail time for finding and reporting security vulnerabilities prior to this.

    I don't think this is true, although it's a very commonly-held belief. Dan Goodin (I think?) wrote an article about this a long time ago, and was only able to come up with a few examples, and none of them fit this fact pattern.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16642155

    What is true is that it is much less legally risky to test someone else's computer than it was 10-15 years ago. People forget that's what you're doing when you look for web vulns! The DOJ has had a norm over the past ~many years not to prosecute good-faith vulnerability research, even though strictly speaking it contravenes CFAA directly. But "risky on paper" is the most you could say about doing that kind of testing back in 2010.

  • codexon 13 minutes ago
    I reported some exploits on hackerone.

    Most got dismissed.

    One of them, a remotely triggerable DoS vector got downgraded in severity. I got a token payment from the company, and 7 years later, it is still not marked as resolved.

    I doubt my situation is unique.

    • tptacek 6 minutes ago
      Most bounty programs won't pay for DoS at all.
      • codexon 1 minute ago
        it isn't simple request flooding, it is application level resource exhaustion
  • sudo_cowsay 1 hour ago
    All good things don't last forever. A organization or company lasting forever with the same goal/mission while using the same methods is a statistical anomaly.
    • wahnfrieden 51 minutes ago
      What is the corrupting force?
      • sudo_cowsay 43 minutes ago
        The joy/energy and human element being reduced. Or sometimes it's profit greed. Or it could just be due to economic conditions at the time. There are lots of ways for organizations to fall. Pick your poison.
      • strictnein 37 minutes ago
        The people who cared leave and are replaced by people who just want a job.
      • mgiampapa 50 minutes ago
        Usually money.
        • shermantanktop 42 minutes ago
          Often preceded by the waning of the passion and self sacrifice that enables things to happen without money.

          It’s sad when it’s asymmetric - founders lose their idealism and sell out while early employees fail to notice the game has changed.

          But dreams are rarely enough to keep things going. And VCs know just what to say to make it seem like the dream and the money can coexist.

        • bigiain 16 minutes ago
          Yep.

          It can be power - see Reddit and Wikipedia mods - but it's usually money. And once VC fundraising is involved, it's pretty much always money.

        • tptacek 5 minutes ago
          Which is another way to say "viability".
  • abofh 44 minutes ago
    It got the executives it paid for
  • charcircuit 40 minutes ago
    I'm surprised someone could get upset at AI triaging of bugs which would save everyone time.
    • mapmeld 20 minutes ago
      From what I've seen in the bounty-related subreddits, AI is flooding bug bounty inboxes with low-value or meaningless reports, or straight-up hallucinations when people use smaller models (to turn a profit, you make lots of low-value bug reports and see who pays out).

      This has a negative effect on humans doing their work with or without LLMs: curl shut down their bounty program, and GitHub just announced they're "restructuring" theirs. The author of this post also makes a case that HackerOne hasn't been honest about LLM training and use, either to hackers or to their own staff.

    • add-sub-mul-div 10 minutes ago
      I can understand coming down on either side of the question of whether these AI reports save or waste time. I cannot understand being surprised or ignorant about the existence or high level beliefs of either side.
    • wahnfrieden 32 minutes ago
      You’re surprised that workers don’t like their work being used to remove the need to pay them for it in the future? Your idea of time saved for the worker is for them to lose their livelihood without compensation
  • applfanboysbgon 50 minutes ago
    > Co-founder Michiel Prins was allowed to leave the HackerOne dungeon to perform damage control with this absolute banger of an AI slop response: [...]

    Wow, it's like he prompted for the most stereotypically AI response possible. There's a tired trope in every sentence going on for four whole paragraphs! I originally quoted it too but thought better and decided to snip it out because I'm pretty sure it would get my account flagged by HN's AI detection algorithm...

    • bigiain 14 minutes ago
      I wonder if that's the golden handcuffed founder equivalent of blinking out SOS in morse code?