keraf 8 days ago

I'd love to see this happen to every billion dollar company that doesn't have a bug bounty program. Offering zero incentive for reporting vulnerability just encourages hackers to exploit it for their own advantage or to wreak havoc.

As a paying customer, I expect better from these companies and personally wouldn't blame the hackers for exploiting their findings if no program exists.

  • TechDebtDevin 8 days ago

    Well the Federal Government certainly wouldn't agree with you. Give it go though!

    • IntelMiner 8 days ago

      The Federal Government? Thank goodness these companies only operate in one country. Or we've finally succeeded in uniting under one singular world government

      • TechDebtDevin 8 days ago

        In case you haven't noticed, the FBI charges hackers across the world on a frequent basis. And you should fear them regardless of what country you're in if you're going to be messing with American companies. I've worked at companies where the FBI caught our engineers that were offshore stealing IP. The Company didn't have a clue, they are watching anything and everything that concerns American interest and yes there are no jurisdictions/borders stopping them, outside of Russia, Iran and NK ofc.

    • InDubioProRubio 8 days ago

      Cant have fitness stress tests for the big guys. They need protection for lazy execution of minimal efforts.

  • batch12 8 days ago

    I think that's called ransomware

    • keraf 7 days ago

      Or negligence :-)

      • batch12 7 days ago

        What if the billion dollar company has a responsible disclosure process and internal vulnerability management program and has just decided not to pay for unsolicited bug reports? Where is the negligence?

TechDebtDevin 8 days ago

Well it might be fun for a sec.

They definately do have backups, no-one is storing 400mm records on a single machine and ultimately you'd just take them offline for an afternoon and then spend 15 years in a federal prison

  • Aeolun 8 days ago

    I think ‘afternoon’ is way too generous to EA’s abilities to do a restore of such proportions.

gamblor956 8 days ago

And this is why the world has turned against tech...

Because the first thought (at least, the highest rated post right now) it that it would have been "fun" to hurt millions of people to teach the company they were doing business with a lesson.

wavefunction 8 days ago

Way more fun to enable every game for every account. Literally. Limited horizons.

m4tthumphrey 9 days ago

I thought about this... What would be the outcome here do you think? Ie if this guy didn't report and did decide to mess around for real? Could he have been tracked? Would EA be down for weeks?!

  • mooreds 9 days ago

    I mean, Kevin Mitnick spent time in jail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick

    I wouldn't mess around with this stuff myself.

    • m4tthumphrey 9 days ago

      Me neither, but would it have been easy to trace him? I mean if he was going to use this for bad, I would assume he would have waited a month or so then done it all via a VPN etc. But point being he _could_ have done this and to be honest for all we know, someone else _has_ been abusing it until it was patched...

      • manbash 9 days ago

        VPN is used to bypass regional restrictions.

        The VPN provider will share information if an active investigation is underway.

nkrisc 8 days ago

You can’t harm companies. Only people. It’s “fun” to ruin the day of millions of people?

  • shiroiushi 8 days ago

    It's going to completely "ruin their day" for someone to not be able to play an EA video game? Really?

    • filcuk 8 days ago

      Why not? Can you not emphasise with people having one thing to look forward to coming home from work? Replace a video game with your favourite thing and see how you'd feel.

      • shiroiushi 7 days ago

        I'd find something else to do; there's no shortage of entertainment options these days. I certainly wouldn't let it "ruin my day". If the unavailability of a single video game actually ruins your whole day, you have a very sad life.