this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
733 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3195 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
'hacked'. Eh. There was an API endpoint left open that allowed them to basically just spam it with no rate limiting. They used the lack of a rate limit to just pull the data out of the API that it was made to produce.
Yeah. They got data in a way that was not intended. That's a hack. It's not always about subverting something by clickity-clacking like in the movies.
Exploit. The system worked as intended, just without a rate limit. A hack would be relying on a vulnerability in the software to make it not function as programmed.
It's the difference between finding a angle in a game world that causes your character to climb steeper than it should, vs rewriting memory locations to no-clip through everything. One causes the system to act in a way that it otherwise wouldn't (SQL injections, etc) -- the other, is using the system exactly as it was programmed.
Downloading videos from YouTube isn't "Hacking" YouTube. Even though it's using the API in a way it wasn't intended. Right-clicking a webpage and viewing the source code isn't hacking - even if the website you're looking at doesn't want you looking at the source.
A missing rate limit is a vulnerability, or a weakness, depending on the definition. You're playing smart without having an idea of what you're talking about. Here you go:
https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/799.html
YouTube videos are public, and as such it's not really hacking. If you were able to download private videos, for example, it would be a vulnerability like "Improper Access Control". It does not matter in the least whether you use an "exploit" in your definition (which is wrong) or "just increment the video ID".
The result is a breach of confidentiality, and as such this is to be classified as a "hack".