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Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable

mmorpheuskafka about 4 hours ago 30 comments

ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

Fiverr (gig work/task platform, competitor to Upwork) uses a service called Cloudinary to process PDF/images in messaging, including work products from the worker to client.

Besides the PDF processing value add, Cloudinary effectively acts like S3 here, serving assets directly to the web client. Like S3, it has support for signed/expiring URLs. However, Fiverr opted to use public URLs, not signed ones, for sensitive client-worker communication.

Moreover, it seems like they may be serving public HTML somewhere that links to these files. As a result, hundreds are in Google search results, many containing PII.

Example query: site:fiverr-res.cloudinary.com form 1040

In fact, Fiverr actively buys Google Ads for keywords like "form 1234 filing" despite knowing that it does not adequately secure the resulting work product, causing the preparer to violate the GLBA/FTC Safeguards Rule.

Responsible Disclosure Note -- 40 days have passed since this was notified to the designated vulnerability email (security@fiverr.com). The security team did not reply. Therefore, this is being made public as it doesn't seem eligible for CVE/CERT processing as it is not really a code vulnerability, and I don't know anyone else who would care about it.

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Discussion (30 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

gregsadetsky6 minutes ago
I wrote to security@fiverr.com and they just replied:

"You’re the second person to flag this issue to us

Please note that our records show no contact with Fiverr security regarding this matter ~40 days ago unlike the poster claims. We are currently working to resolve the situation"

HeliumHydride16 minutes ago
It seems that someone sent a DMCA complaint months ago relating to this: https://lumendatabase.org/notices/53130362
applfanboysbgon32 minutes ago
Software development jobs are too accessible. Jobs with access to/control over millions of people's data should require some kind of genuine software engineering certification, and there should be business-cratering fines for something as egregious as completely ignoring security reports. It is ridiculous how we've completely normalised leaks like this on a weekly or almost-daily basis.
morpheuskafka29 minutes ago
They may be part of it, but as a publicly traded company, there's got to be a at least a few people there with a fancy pedigree (not that that actually means they are good at their job or care). But if such a test existed, they presumably would have passed it.

They also have an ISO 27001 certificate (they try to claim a bunch of AWSs certs by proxy on their security page, which is ironic as they say AWS stores most of their data while apparently all uploads are on this).

qingcharlesabout 1 hour ago
That's wild. Thousands of SSNs in there. Also a lot of Fiverr folks selling digital products and all their PDF courses are being returned for free in the search results.
mtmailabout 4 hours ago
You followed the correct reporting instructions.

https://www.fiverr.com/.well-known/security.txt only has "Contact: security@fiverr.com" and in their help pages they say "Fiverr operates a Bug Bounty program in collaboration with BugCrowd. If you discover a vulnerability, please reach out to security@fiverr.com to receive information about how to participate in our program."

wxwabout 3 hours ago
Wow, surprised this isn't blowing up more. Leaking form 1040s is egregious, let alone getting them indexed by Google...
janoelzeabout 1 hour ago
really bad stuff in the results. very easy to find API tokens, penetration test reports, confidental PDFs, internal APIs. Fiverr needs to immediately block all static asset access until this is resolved. business continuity should not be a concern here.
mpegabout 1 hour ago
lots of admin credentials too, which have probably never been changed
janoelze42 minutes ago
admin passwords to dating sites, that's the stuff people get blackmailed with
qq6618 minutes ago
How does someone's dating site password end up in Fiverr?
tfsh33 minutes ago
Hopefully this can be patched soon.

Their robots file specifically has the code to disallow search engine crawling commented out - https://fiverr-res.cloudinary.com/robots.txt.

---

     See http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html for documentation on how to use the robots.txt file
     #
     # To ban all spiders from the entire site uncomment the next two lines:
     # User-Agent: \*
     # Disallow: /
johnmlussierabout 1 hour ago
Probably not in scope but maybe https://bugcrowd.com/engagements/cloudinary will care?

This is bad.

morpheuskafkaabout 1 hour ago
They probably wouldn't act immediately as there's no way for them to enable signing without breaking their client's site. The only cleanup you could do without that would be having google pull that subdomain I guess?

(Fiverr itself uses Bugcrowd but is private, having to first email their SOC as I did.)

impish9208about 1 hour ago
This is crazy! So many tax and other financial forms out in the open. But the most interesting file I’ve seen so far seems to be a book draft titled “HOOD NIGGA AFFIRMATIONS: A Collection of Affirming Anecdotes for Hood Niggas Everywhere”. I made it to page 27 out of 63.
yieldcrv15 minutes ago
I found someone's manuscript, at first I thought it would scandalous to find it ghost written, but it actually is just annotations and someone proof reading it, the annotations come up in the PDF

I found the author on Amazon and the book still hasn't been released

this is sad

sergiotapia23 minutes ago
Link please :pray:
yapfrog15 minutes ago
https://fiverr-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/f_pdf,q_auto/...

I will say that the title is the best part

onraglanroadabout 1 hour ago
I've read worse. Better than Dan Brown!
b00ty4breakfast28 minutes ago
that bar is subterranean, haha
mraza007about 3 hours ago
Woah that's brutal all the important information is wild in public
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sergiotapia31 minutes ago
This is really bad, just straight up people's income, SSN and worse just right there in the search results on Brave Search even.
yieldcrv34 minutes ago
this is a bad leak, appreciate the attempts at disclosure before this
smashahabout 2 hours ago
They bought and.co and then dropped it. strange company
popalchemistabout 2 hours ago
Burn it to the ground.
BoredPositronabout 2 hours ago
Just by scrolling over it that's really rough.
iwontberudeabout 2 hours ago
Loooool what a mess
walletdrainer42 minutes ago
> Moreover, it seems like they may be serving public HTML somewhere that links to these files. As a result, hundreds are in Google search results, many containing PII

This is not how Google works.

AndroTux23 minutes ago
It kind of is, though. Google doesn't randomly try to visit every URL on the internet. It follows links. Therefore, for these files to be indexed by Google, they need to be linked to from somewhere.