> This exploit could have been used to create a massive near-complete database of every Google account has automatically had a Youtube account created.

Massive email databases are extremely cheap, often free. For this vulnerability to be worth more than $10k there would have to be something about it being a near-complete library of Google accounts (rather than just another massive mailing list).

And that's assuming the prospective buyer believed that they could exploit this vulnerability in full before discovery. If I'm reading this exploit right, each email recovered requires two requests, one of which needs to make one of the fields 2.5 million characters long in order to error out the notification email sent to the victim. Presumably that email sending error would show up in a log somewhere, so the prospective attacker would have to send billions of requests fast enough that Google can't block them as suspicious or patch the vulnerability, all the while knowing full well that they're filling up an error log somewhere and leaving an extremely suspicious pattern of megabyte-sized request bodies on a route that normally doesn't even reach kilobytes.

I'm honestly not seeing how you could make an email list out of this that is anywhere near complete, and even if you could I'm not sure where the value to it would be.

>Massive email databases are extremely cheap, often free

There are different qualities of email databases. "Known real email by Youtube account holders" would be a high value database. Definitely not free.

This type of vulnerability is extremely valuable for private investigators, too. "Who uploaded this video which my client is extremely interested in?"

>This type of vulnerability is extremely valuable for private investigators, too. "Who uploaded this video which my client is extremely interested in?"

Would exploiting this vulnerability violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? If so, would a private investigator really want to do that?

The CFAA is so broad that it's really for the prosecutor to decide you're evil hacker and go after you, even if you didn't do anything bad. Like use view source in a web browser. A PI works around legally grey things anyway, what's the CFAA on top of that?

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/government-politics/pars...

Sure but did you read the rest of the post you're replying to?

That database only exists in theory, based on extrapolation of this vulnerability to billions of individual exploits, and I think we can all agree that Google would detect this activity and shut it down.

Hence, that database might fetch a decent price if it existed, but it doesn't.

And then what?

Exploits need to plug into a business plan. Like any business plan there has to be somewhere that money gets extracted and that money needs to be more than the exploit cost & infrastructure costs & a risk premium.

If you can’t trivially say how the exploit explicitly gets turned into cash you probably are on the wrong track. Doubly so if it’s not a known standard and commoditized way that’s happened before.

There is often phishing campaigns targeting larger channels on YT, trying to trick someone with access to it into opening malicious e-mail attachments, with the end-goal of taking over the channel. Usually the attackers then put a livestream on it and push some crypto scam. It must make enough money, given that it keeps happening.

Most recent example I've seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnVxWK6DfMQ

So then why do they need additional information about emails? They clearly already can email these youtubers.

This will enable you to get the private e-mail of the google account that owns the channel, which is not necessarily the same one a channel may give away publicly.

So for some channels that provided no contact information, you now can acquire an email address, and for everyone else you may now get an additional one.

It also enables you to link multiple channels back to the same person.

Every bit of information you can get your hands on counts for social engineering attacks.

For very famous individuals this may also open them up to harassment. You can't find Elon Musk's private telephone number on the Tesla homepage for good reason. For that class of people, any time that sort of information leaks, they need to get a new private phone number/e-mail address.

I think we can imagine reasons why this would be valuable. It's a vuln. That's worth know about and fixing.

I'm not sure that there are terribly many black market opportunities for "every bit of information" such that this should be a six figure payout or whatever.

Sure, but here's some examples that may be worth a lot of money to the right person, or can just cause a lot of harm:

- Regime critics with a channel on YT.

- Vulnerable individuals and others trying to keep their identity a secret. Putting yourself on YT means putting yourself in front of every deranged individual out there.

- Trump quite famously runs some of his own social media accounts personally, for better or for worse. And even where he doesn't, he probably retains ultimate control - in the case of YT it might be his personal google account that created the channel. He's probably not the only high value target to do so.

Also if you happen to be in any date leak, being able to figure out your private e-mail address gives attackers another place to check whether you re-used a password.

This is the “heist vs exploit sale” dichotomy that tptacek mentions.

For any vuln you can make up a hypothetical one off usage. But to find the right buyer for that is effectively building a team ala The Great Muppet Caper.

Say you’re a blackhat OSINTer trying to steal crypto. You have a first initial and a last name for a target (“J. Smith”) - plus you know this person is on github and discord.

You take out your handy email list and run a regex to find candidate accounts that match “J Smith”. You pipe matches into a recon script to check if github and discord accounts exist for each email. Suddenly, you’ve got a small pool of matches. You try more account-existence recon to find all the sites they’re signed up on. You look up all breached creds tied to the target emails, then run cred stuffing against any sensitive services they’ve signed up for.

Boom, you’ve gone from first initial + last name to compromising an account in thirty minutes.

Surely the key part of this is "this person's email address and password has been published online together" rather than "I can identify this person's email address."

It can get turned into cash by the EU when Google gets a massive fine for leaking private data.

> Exploits need to plug into a business plan

Or, you know, develop a new "business plan" around an exploit.

Even if that did happen, it would drive down the price of the exploit and especially so for server side novel ones.

Nobody does this. It would be an insane proposition. The vulnerability is going to die very shortly into your attempt to capitalize on it. Businesses have startup costs they have to pay off.

>Nobody does that.

Sure: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-01/league-of-legends-que...

He reportedly made $32k and barely avoided jail time... which does not sound to me like the $10k payout is undervalued.

Wouldn't that require, if true, that new revenue streams around exploits aren't generally pursued? It seems like new scams, and variations on old ones around new methods, come about on a somewhat regular basis. And as with any business, there is going to be some speculative work around new "product offerings", so to speak. I'm with you on the idea that they are less valuable, as 'spec work, than something that enhances existing revenue streams in a more predictable way.

You could dump all the data over a matter of weeks, then you’re sitting on a treasure trove that will pay out over 5+ years.

You could sell it non-exclusively to every data broker

But then what? Given the number of accounts Google has, odds are that nearly every alphanumeric combo less than 8 or 10 characters plus “@gmail.com” is a google account. This vulnerability gets you other domains, but still not seeing it. Massive databases of email addresses are a dime a dozen.

The only angle I can imagine is phishing for high profile creators, and at most this is a “makes it easier” and not a “creates the problem” bug.

You could target accounts of users likely to be younger & more susceptible to phishing for passwords-- kids subscribed to channels with younger content. Or other interest-based targeting. It's not quite spear phishing, but still more targeted.

The back of an envelope can get you making silly claims quickly (ex. 26 ^ 8 is 208 billion)

I think you might be off by a factor of 10. Alphanumeric would be at least 36 characters, which would imply 2.8 trillion combininations (36 ^ 8).

yeah, I was doing the charitable as possible version

Not seeing the problem. Are you assuming that somehow there is at most one Gmail account per person on earth?

I have… I’m not sure. Ten maybe? And those are actual conveniences for different purposes. I’m sure plenty of people have hundreds, if not thousands. So what?

I'm a bit confused:

- I charitably went with 208 billion, 25 for every single individual on this planet.

- As the other replies note, I chose a misleading number that is too generous by 3 orders of magnitude.

- You can't see the problem

Something seems off.

Honestly, that leaves straight up harassment of YouTubers by other YouTubers and fans off the table which by itself would motivate a few of them. Some of the same people who play in the black and grey hat worlds are the same people buying DDOS attacks and swatting streamers. They would have a party with their emails.

> which by itself would motivate a few of them

Motivation in the abstract is not enough to counter GP's point—they have to have enough motivation that it's worth more than $10,000 to them and also have more than $10,000 to spend and also have the connections necessary to get in touch with someone who's able to sell a vulnerability like this and also be able to exploit it in a timely manner or at least think they can.

Or be a black hat. An incredibly common hat.

Draw up a straw-man business plan for this, with SWAG numbers.

The motivation isn't financial but the impact to some of Google's biggest earners would be significant. Never mind the PR when Mr Beast and SSSniperwolf's personal details leak online.

Major channels typically would be using a YouTube brand account, not a single normal Google account. (This is so that they can e.g. delegate parts of the channel management to multiple people without sharing a single login). The email address for a brand account is totally worthless.

You mean, "[email protected]"?