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A Blackstone real estate company exposed SSN digits, DOBs, addresses and more
- toomuchtodo 1mo agoBeam Living https://www.beamliving.com/ https://www.beamliving.com/
- bearsyankees 1mo agoyep
- toomuchtodo 1mo agoGreat work, very detailed vuln report. Its what I'd want to see for triage and remediation.
- bearsyankees 1mo agoThanks!! Just trying to protect other's (and in this case, my own) data :)
- tptacek 1mo agoBeam Living is just the property management company that runs buildings Blackstone owns in New York City. There are thousands of companies like this all over the country and if you poke hard at any of them you will find stuff like this. There's nothing wrong with pitching stories this way, but for context, if you look at this researcher's archive, they're all basically "I found a vulnerability in some big company's thingy". The news hook here is literally just "I found a GraphQL bug". This is not Alex Schapiro's most interesting front-page story (by which I mean: they've posted some genuinely interesting stuff before).
- consensus1 1mo agoThere absolutely is everything wrong with implicating a company that has no knowledge of and no responsibility for the breach.
- tptacek 1mo agoYou mean the Blackstone namedrop? I had the same reaction. Beam is an internal division of Blackstone, for whatever that's worth, but I don't think there's a news hook about Blackstone here. This is, like, every property management company everywhere, whether indie or corporate.
- bearsyankees 1mo agoIf this is the case then IMO all the more reason to publicize it -- my SSN shouldn't be exposed just because I applied for a lease [ and we shouldn't just brush that off as something that is a given ]
- tptacek 1mo agoI mean, that's true, and I'm not saying there's anything misleading about the post, just that this is true of basically all the companies that do this. All I'm saying is that there isn't a meaningful Blackstone hook here.
- DANmode 1mo agoIf you’re too big to manage your subsidiaries, don’t buy them/build them. This is no different than blaming the big AI tool because it messed up doing work in your spaghetti codebase - “how else was I supposed to do it?”. Stay small enough to do business properly. Yes, this is a ding on the parent company. How indicative it is of their other companies making the exact same mistakes is a different question. But I’d expect issues somewhere.
- tptacek 1mo agoBeam Living manages giant high-rise housing developments in New York City. It's not a mom-and-pop problem space, unless you're for some reason opposed to density.
- bearsyankees 1mo agoYeah I hear you but I think this community loves writeups like these -- I personally have learned a TON about how to be an effective security researcher by reading technical writeups others have posted here. Agreed this vuln wasn't a complicated one by any means but I feel like this is the forum for sharing this stuff
- tptacek 1mo agoYeah, you're totally fine.
- dylan604 1mo agoBut as GP stated, if as a security researcher you discover this as Company X using Company Y's product that has the vuln but your write up lays the blame at Company X's feet leaves a lot to be said about your skillz as a researcher. If you wrote it up as Company Y's product has a vuln and is used in this market by companies like X you'd sound like a much more skilled researcher.
- bearsyankees 1mo agoAlso, as far as I know, no residents were ever alerted that their data was exposed so this also is a bit of a public disclosure angle
- ldoughty 1mo agoIt has to be 18 months after public disclosure before the company has to send out a letter letting them know that someone might use their information, and they are eligible for yet another free credit monitoring service...... /S
- jordanb 1mo agoI'm glad HN can be counted on to defend Blackstone's good name.
- tptacek 1mo agoThat's not what I'm doing, but if you want me to, I'll bite, because Blackstone does more for housing than activists do (if you measure housing outcomes in terms of how many people end up housed, as opposed to whether or not the "right" people get to live in the "right" neighborhoods). I think the expectation on a message board is that you can name drop a big private equity firm and count on voting support for them. Unfortunately for you, I've spent the last 5 years working on rolling back single-family zoning in my municipality, and an alarming amount of that work has involved pushing back on NIMBYs arguing that if we allow housing construction Blackstone (very specifically Blackstone) will just come snap all the real estate up and hoard it. So I've had some time to marinate in this particular bit of populist rhetoric.
- ilamont 1mo agoWell, the other notable fact about this story is it's Blackstone, which has a record of giving managers a lot of leeway to do anything to juice the numbers. Two examples: 1) Hiring 14 year old slaughterhouse workers (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pssi-hired-same-child-twice-clean-slaughterhouses-document-rcna71633 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pssi-hired-same-child-t...) 2) Gamifying of one its genealogy websites that tracked cemetery markers, which resulted in people "claiming" victims of mass shootings for points (https://dna-explained.com/2022/06/02/find-a-grave-owned-by-ancestry-seriously-just-stop-incentivizing-the-creation-of-memorials-of-the-recently-deceased/ https://dna-explained.com/2022/06/02/find-a-grave-owned-by-a...) ETA People have asked about the second example. In a nutshell, Ancestry purchased Find-A-Grave in 2013, and Blackstone acquired Ancestry in 2020. Originally, Find a Grave was basically used by amateur genealogists to check the names and dates on gravestones across North America. So, if you want to verify Grandma Smith's burial location and other gravestone data three states away, you could search the database for free. Volunteers could submit photos and other data. Blackstone brought in a Facebook executive to run its genealogy business, and gamified Find A Grave for engagement/revenue purposes (Find A Grave is top of funnel for Ancestry subscriptions and also is heavily blanketed in ad networks.) Gamification led to some very ugly situations, and as I recall they barely backed down over this. Per Roberta Estes, an experienced genealogist cited above: The problem is that finding your loved one’s memorial, often with incorrect information, created by a stranger is unexpectedly jarring, at best. Especially to discover that your family member was only a trophy harvest whose memorial was created hours after they died. Then, having to ask (sometimes beg an unresponsive person) for the transfer of their memorial to you, only to have the creator’s name forever associated with the memorial adds insult to injury. ... Who in their right mind would think that entering those massacred children into Find a Grave immediately was acceptable by any criteria? Any standards of decency? And why would Find a Grave tolerate this for even a minute? Death is traumatic for family members under the “best” of circumstances and it only goes downhill from there.
- rationalist 1mo agoGeez... Item 2 could be its own HN post.
- phkahler 1mo agoYeah like why is Blackstone named and not the actual company? Clickbait.
- josefritzishere 1mo agoWhat a trashfire of a company. Where are the legal penalties for such reckless behavior?
- jjice 1mo agoI work for a company building real estate adjacent software and have worked on connections to all the major property management systems and large (and small) proptech companies. I can tell you that at least 90% of them have some of the worst security practices you've ever seen. Many of the largest property management systems allow a third-party vendor to export your Social Security number and date of birth, and most property managers I've seen don't bat an eye at giving up as much information as their vendor requests (which they usually don't need). Real estate is very much a closed of group of more traditional business and has not begun to understand their responsibility to keep this data safe. Edit for more detail: To tack onto this, it's very much the case we're all familiar with where management doesn't care about something being built correctly, they just want it built. Add on top that the management usually has no technical background. Also add that very few engineers that are passionate about writing good software want to stick around at these companies. It's a real nightmare industry. There are some companies that will give you faith, but they're the occasional large property manager that's been scared shitless about a security based lawsuit (fine by me) or a proptech that's "disrupting" the industry that will be acquired by one of the big dogs in 18 months and slowly eroded away.
- walrus01 1mo agoMy biggest take away from this is not really anything about the specific security vulnerability, but rather that real estate industry people will buy any SaaS product without research or any due diligence. I have personally seen real estate people buy some trendy new app based intercom or entry phone system and jam it onto the front of their building and try to require that all of the residents use it...
- dylan604 1mo agoWhat would you expect them to do? They're in real estate. They're not coders. Sure, they could hire a company to evaluate choices and let them know, but they're so not coders how would they even know that's something that can be done? Also, how much time would that add to getting off of a spreadsheet that gets emailed to people each time it's updated? We seem to lose the concept that people outside of tech have not idea about anything other than whatever they do. Just because you (the royal you) knows the ins/outs of security software does not mean the other 98% of the population does. Yet you're blaming them for buying a tool to do the thing they need help. Blame the devs for being idiots. Don't blame the users.
- madaxe_again 1mo agoHah. This is nothing. I know a blackstone company, who were a client of mine before they underwent a hostile takeover (blackstone fired everybody). They claim to be ISO 27001 certified. They are not. They never removed me from their ISMS, and I can see it has not been touched in three years now. Wait, it gets worse. My root credentials still work, both for the app, and for AWS. Nobody has logged into AWS in years (hey, we built a reliable system). I have unfettered access to highly sensitive (in some cases literally classified) commercial data for the likes of Apple, Siemens, Philips, BAE Systems, Raytheon, and more. Wait, it gets worse. They did something to the API endpoint. You can now bypass authentication entirely and anyone has access to this data. Anyway. Bunch of shysters. Incompetent shysters.
- lightedman 1mo agoIf what you say is true a report to ISO themselves will strip their certifications away and make them toxic to other businesses.
- rationalist 1mo agoWhat certifications will they strip if they don't have the certifications to begin with.
- madaxe_again 1mo agoThat isn’t how ISO works, at all.
- lacoolj 1mo agoI'm glad you did this, but be careful man. Dudes have been prosecuted (right? wtf?) for way less: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1046124278/missouri-newspaper-security-flaws-hacking-investigation-gov-mike-parson https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1046124278/missouri-newspaper... Hoping this doesn't happen to you!
- antonvs 1mo agoNo charges were filed in that case. It was just an out-of-control, weak, stupid, and corrupt governor - Mike Parsons - abusing his power to try to cover up his ignorance and his administration’s incompetence. If you don’t stand up to weak bullies like that, you end up with people like Trump and Putin in charge.
- miserylovesmidw 1mo agoMike Parson is a dumb, racist boomer in a state full of them. He was a trump clone that wanted to criminalize abortion and opposed helping anyone but himself. He also loved pardoning white criminals and ignoring all othe races.