Microsoft 0-day feud escalates as researcher threatens another exploit dump

Attacking the messenger is an age-old trend in the bug reporting arena.

Microsoft has the backing of many governments, and has access to the best legal teams possible, leaving this guy in a world of hurt.

Microsoft seems to have brought this on themselves by creating a complex and user-hostile bug reporting system. It seems to me that they could have offered this person a job or a contract, because Eclipse has been amazingly effective at uncovering high-severity exploits.

Also, Eclipse could have approached various governments offering the exploits for sale, because a lucrative market exists for such things, assuming they aren't already in the NSA portfolio. Lots of above-board companies do the same thing.

Quotes in this article blame Eclipse for the damage, but the blame should really rest with Microsoft. Eclipse is apparently just one person using an AI framework. Microsoft has vastly more resources to discover and fix problems with their products, but they never seem to do it themselves.

> “CVD is a two-way street,” he said. “The vendor has some responsibility as well, so to go out publicly stating this person violated CVD without showing any of the correspondence seems bold.”

> “It confusingly claims their program ‘ensures researchers are compensated and publicly acknowledged’ in a statement answering a researcher who says he got neither,”

Well said.

I know this is a crazy take. But I go feel so down trodden by many many tech corps these days I find it hard not to have a smidge of satisfaction for this guy pointing out the colossal favour research developers do for them by responsible disclosure.

That said, I feel bad for the inevitable victims of exploitation and also I am certain he will end up criminalized or as per usual the law will enforce a large corps will against him.

Yes. Definitely a Friday night after a hard week take.

It's kind of fascinating how large corporations can end up acting like petulant children against their own interests and stated goals. We don't know who said or did what in this situation, but as TFA says, even if the researcher was a maximally bad actor, MSFT's public response hurts their interests. Sometimes individuals behave like petulant children but for a well-run corporation it's a failure mode.

In my experience, corps sometimes behave this way not because it's the 'corporate intent' but simply due to internal politics and ass-covering by individual middle managers. MSFT's response is puzzling because it doesn't clear up anything nor does it try to de-escalate. It's also not the sort of completely neutral statement made when you need to respond but have nothing to say yet. This statement implies the researcher is a bad actor while also being vaguely threatening. I can't imagine any way this benefits MSFT.

It appears more like a junior exec trying to manage the optics so it looks like their department isn't in the wrong. This ass-covering accomplishes nothing for MSFT. Even if the researcher was demanding payment for a vuln and wasn't producing sufficient justification for their demand or wasn't following the process, this isn't a productive response. It sounds more like a manager is worried what their boss thinks. The manager acting this way is bad but the root cause is often the manager's upline creating a context where managers feel they need to ass-cover and stage manage optics.

The best interests of the customers of Microsoft is an immediate apology, a payment of at least $100,000, and a signed agreement pledging that no (further) legal action will be taken.

The denial of Microsoft is just as harmful as the exploits of these flaws.

Responding to bug bounty reports is a thankless job. Especially these days it's a flood of AI spam, language barriers, "pay me first", incomplete reports, huge egos, and people who think every find should be treated as a critical vulnerability. The people who handle these reports often do so after-hours or on holidays. In smaller companies they're also often the ones who manage the triage, patching, testing, and security release process. In larger companies they have to find owners for every line of code and convince those code owners of the severity (often knowing that neither or them will be rewarded for doing the work).

All it takes is one wrong person to be assigned as a report comes in, a person who doesn't understand the real value of a bounty program, or one person having a bad day to completely ruin a company's reputation. It seems like that might have happened here (of course MS has done this before so who knows if it'll matter in the end).

Microsoft needs to be completely transparent and to do so immediately. They should, with the reporters permission, release all communications. They can exclude technical details if patches aren't available yet. Doing anything less is going to prevent a lot of people from using their bounty program in the future and we'll all be worse off for it. They almost certainly made a mistake and they need to own up to it.

It is not all about money, but microsoft had a net income of 101 billion last year, and a 36% profit margin.

I am not saying humans or AI can create "perfect" software, but NASA has shown there is a HUGE gap between what can be achieved and what commercial software has generally done. We have given software a pass on the liability for the damage it can caused when it is defective for too long, that's the only way to change this, it must hit the bottom line.

I was reding about this yesterday and my tinfoil hat started to rustle in the drawer.

It sounded like it really could have been a backdoor, that was complicated enough to not be an easy replacement to roll out without being detected, so Microslop tried to shut down the discovery as soon as possible, annoyed the wrong researcher and now they're at risk of really having to remove their back door to an administration that is not exactly understanding.

It's poor form to publish exploits like this but Microsoft not paying their bounty is also poor form, and so is attempting to exploit the legal system to defend Microsoft's "right" to write buggy code.

there are active forks, and active mitigations for redsun undefend and bluehammer.

so far as i can tell yellowkey is problematic, as the exploit takes advantage of a backdoor that ms needs, to "manage" your computer.

only recently has a OOB mitigation been offered

https://www.techspot.com/news/112410-security-researcher-mic...

I guess I'll play devil's advocate here, don't shoot me.

Over the course of my career I've had to deal with multiple hacks, DDOSes, and even situations working with the FBI. It's a mess, and extremely frustrating and unfair to those of us who are just trying to do a good job and make a living. Those of you who are throwing stones at Microsoft's coding, how confident are you that your code is safe from this new AI age?

Obviously MS handled this poorly, even after reading this article it's not clear how MS handles bug bounties. But that doesn’t mean this “researcher” deserves a pass.

Releasing 0-days, especially working exploit code for unpatched vulnerabilities, is extremely unethical. It has real potential to cause a lot of harm to regular engineers, and users who had nothing to do with the dispute.

this is from 2010 but says that microsoft was not going to pay bug bounties https://www.computerworld.com/article/1510124/microsoft-no-m...

did they start to do that at some point, or is this a pressure (blackmail?) campaign to get the to do that? I have no love for, but rather hate for, Microsoft, so I'm not suggesting blackmail in the sense of defending them, but it's something they could claim.

this is on Microsoft's website, they don't promise much for CVD

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/cvd

I wonder: what's the approximate market value on the bugs so far released?

Reeks of a Management trying not to assign CVE labels to obvious vulnerabilities, so that in the public Windows doesn't come across as the security swiss chess nightmare that it is.

> “We remain firmly opposed to these actions, and any disclosure outside proper coordination that could harm our customers and the digital ecosystem,”

Precisely. /Your/ customers. I have no obligation to them and you profit handsomely from them. I'm not sure you can use "opposition" as a strategy to ameliorate your own negligence followed by inaction.

"Ultimately, “the bugs are Microsoft's,” Moussouris said."

Not much has changed at Microsoft

Still trying to blame others for its own incompetence

Responsible disclosure isn't a law, it's a norm vendors invented and lean on when it suits them. Nothing legally requires you to report to a vendor first. Full disclosure and non disclosure are a valid choice as well.

Maybe Microsoft should spend less energy threatening researchers and more on not shipping the slop code in the first place.

What is Microslop management and PR department doing? How come this can go for a week?

They spent billions trying to build this open source and developer friendly image to just burn it all over $200,000 of unpaid security bounties.

Microsoft is a dumpster fire.

I read a little about BitLocker. It seems to store the encryption key in TPM and acquire it automatically after boot. I wonder, can encryption key be extracted by inserting a rogue PCIe card and reading it from memory, or by inserting a rogue DDR memory card with a backdoor to read the key from it, or by sniffing CPU - TPM bus?

Related:

GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315968

I've been working with Microsoft products since about 1989. It has been mostly miserable, like living with a schizophrenic gorilla. You wake up in the morning and don't know how fucked your day is going to be. Dealing with them has been absolutely impossible even when you were one of their "gold" tier partners back in the day.

I hope the promise of a July 14th threat goes as planned. They need to hurt. And everyone needs to see the risks they are taking by using their products.

At the end of the day, Microsoft won't care how bad any of this will make them look. Their reputation has been abysmal for decades, but none of it actually seems to have any kind of negative effect on their bottom line.

I know this is a cynical approach, but I imagine most security flaws in Microsoft products are somewhat intentional. Either by purposefully putting them there or by willingly ignoring them.

It’s widely known how much Microsoft cooperates with three letter agencies. I think they are in a bind on how to act in these situations. They don’t want to acknowledge or fix the 0-day vulnerabilities because they don’t know if those are in use via state sponsored operations. Either they deal with customer fallout or they deal with the grief from their agency liaisons that they interrupted a multi-year operation by fixing the 0-day.

Vulnerability researchers really should avoid reporting to Microsoft and just sell them instead.

Watching Microsoft squirm is always peak

I may not have seen the full story - and I am cognizant of this - but what I have seen so far puts me solidly on the side of Nightmare Eclipse.

Microsoft is making all indications that it is behaving like a colossal dick. It’s not a good look. As always: if you find yourself in a deep hole, stop digging.

bold move in the age of llm 0 days. this will be worse than geohot and sony

Did Microsoft ever explain why Bitlocker could be deliberately circumvented?

Part of me thinks they are welcoming this drama because if the other 0-days are genuine bugs then it muddies the water and shifts the focus away from a the fact that they shipped an intentionally backdoored security product.

This is poor damage control by Microslop. Why would the researcher publish valuable exploits without trying to get a bounty?

Usually, when an individual is that upset, the group or corporation is wrong and tries to shape public perception by lying.

Since when is publishing zero days a crime anyway? Shame on Microslop for these intimidation tactics. The real crime is vibe coding operating systems.

Sorry not sorry

They should really hire him.

Hey MSRC. Maybe don't ban security researchers and then complain about vulnerabilities not being disclosed to you? Have you tried not fucking yoursef?