3 ms·
Everyone here seems to be saying "oh god, don't do it, CFAA!" Respectfully, this sort of fear is what holds the Internet back. You are incredibly unlikely to g
by borski 12y ago
Everyone here seems to be saying "oh god, don't do it, CFAA!"
Respectfully, this sort of fear is what holds the Internet back. You are incredibly unlikely to get sued unless: you are threatening to disclose publicly, you intentionally stole data from the site and are storing it now, you threaten to sell said stolen data to a journalist or anyone else, etc.
It costs companies, generally, a lot of money to sue someone. They aren't interested in doing it unless you seriously piss them off or actually cause their business/revenue harm.
If you are not weev, trolling them publicly and saying you'll sell their data, you can likely disclose and be fine. Just be nice about it.
By being nice, I have disclosed hundreds of vulnerabilities over the years, in this manner. Sometimes they even let me write a blog post about it afterward.
If you want, email me and we can discuss in more detail. Email is in my profile.
tl;dr: find someone to contact via LinkedIn or email (CISO or CTO usually works well), be incredibly nice and non-threatening about it, and you'll be fine.
- raquo 12y agoThis kind of law is what holds the internet back. Why should I risk bankruptcy, litigation and imprisonment over some intern forgetting to sanitize HTML? Like that never happened before on the internet. I'm a kind person, but my #1 obligation is to my family, not random internet website users. Internet can not ever be risk free. You post data online, you can expect a low probability of it getting lost / stolen. You're fine with that, because most data is actually not that private, and because you somehow benefit from posting it online. Security vulnerability reporting must be risk free, because it's possible for it to be. You just need a proper law.