this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Privacy
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Has been taken down. See archived copy
Probably smart to take it down. What he did could be construed as hacking.
I have no idea what the law is in India, but if he got a "hacking" charge for this it would be a gross miscarriage of justice, considering he never once did anything resembling social engineering, brute forcing passwords, any sort of injection attack, or anything else that might actually be involved in hacking.
However, assuming he never tried to reach out to the company themselves first (and I saw no indication in the article that he had), this is really quite a horrible irresponsible disclosure. It's pretty obviously a significant leak of sensitive data—both customer and business data—and giving them 90 days to fix it before alerting the public to what you found is pretty basic security ethics.
I also don’t know the laws in India, but in the US nearly every major “hacking” case for decades has been a miscarriage of justice to some degree or another.
Like Kevin Mitnick who simply figured out that a major early ISP was keeping customer payment information in plaintext on an internet-connected server.
That’s a huge misrepresentation of what Mitnick did and how the government mischarged him. He did a bunch of dumb stuff that was illegal. He was overcharged in very bad ways supporting ridiculous lies from the companies he broke into.
Well there was that one part where he turned off his laptop after (not wanting to drop what he did here as the article was pulled), but I could totally see a company freaking out and going nuclear. That being said, I'm just looking through the FreedomGoggles that recently saw a "hacker" using F12 to compromise a bunch of teacher data. You know, their important sensitive data that was definitely not sent to their device where it could be seen by right clicking and hitting view source.
Self-censorship working a little too well.