Re:Capital One Says Breach Hit 100M Individuals in U.S
by lanstin on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @02:45PM
(#20567879)
Detailed knowledge of a system gives you all kinds of knowledge about how to exploit it. You don't need special access if you know X% of users misconfigure feature Y.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Capital One Says Breach Hit 100M Individuals in U.S
by floatingatoll on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @04:41PM
(#20568904)
It's not about knowing that X% are misconfigured, it's about whether special access or circumstances led to locating them more efficiently than the general public could have.
Special access can make the difference between "locating X% of misconfigured users in a single admin panel query" and "locating X% of misconfigured users by scanning every S3 bucket in existence without being caught".
Or to draw a weak analogy, knowing that a closed-source PRNG algorithm is defective does not necessarily help locate all keys generated by it, but having access to force it to generate numbers for you (or to study its source code) absolutely does help.