yesterday at 11:09 PM
> At the time of posting, I didn't know about any embargo. My contact had told me there was no embargo, and her contact had told her the same thing.
If you're not a party to an embargo, and no one told you an embargo even exists... you should not follow the embargo. In fact, you should maybe even consider leaking basic details or challenging the embargo if you are in this situation. In your situation, they had lost information asymmetry before the news got to you. I don't know where people got the idea that unrelated third parties have to follow embargos.
Embargos are not about keeping secrets, they are about the game theory of coordinated disclosure.
yesterday at 11:53 PM
On one hand you have the OP, who is self reflecting. On the other hand you have Dan Lorenc from Chainguard.
today at 6:45 AM
The thing is, his reasoning isn't even wrong (assuming what he said about the spread of PoCs and the ease of finding the vuln was true), but it clearly prioritized Chainguard customers over the broader ecosystem.
today at 9:01 AM
It was a selfish, PR exercise. He could have done it quietly. He could have just made sure his customers got an emergency patch quietly. (those who are willing and capable to patch) It is not common that anyone in the public could use his source except for his customers. It is difficult to just build from his source and drop it to any operating system and setup and expect it to work (let alone compliance and other requirements). Instead, he expected the public to thank him like he was actually doing an act of good. Loss for words, to be honest.
today at 7:40 AM
today at 7:23 AM
it was easy to find if you had the tokens even without the chainguard patch
today at 7:43 AM
The bragging by the discoverer made everyone start looking. Then when the PHP foundation made the announcement on the website there was a mad scramble. Up to 18 hours before release there were already demos. Look I get that it's a rock and a hard place but frankly at that point you should release the patch. I know there was a lot of fear over picking the wrong patch but having nothing is still bad.
today at 5:17 AM
got a link
today at 6:34 AM
Yeah, I donât think OP did anything wrong. Someone in the chain violated embargo, but it wasnât OP.
yesterday at 11:22 PM
Well, this is an iterated prisonerâs dilemma.
today at 1:28 AM
Iâd say maybe itâs more like a Rokoâs Basilisk. He knew the potential existence of an embargo, but didnât do anything to protect the embargo. So now that the embargo turned out to be real, he will be punished. Otherwise if he truly did not know an embargo could even exist, he could not be blamed.
today at 2:52 AM
There was no embargo. If there's an "embargo" but parties not subject to the embargo know about it... there's no embargo.
today at 8:37 AM
There's no such thing as Roko's Basilisk, only Pascal's Wager.
today at 1:45 AM
Except he wonât be punished, because nothing he did was legally wrong.
today at 2:48 AM
He won't be punished by the legal system.
today at 3:18 AM
In the tech industry, there are punishments far worse than the legal system.
today at 4:03 AM
Would you please identify those you're thinking of?
today at 7:33 AM
on the darkweb you can pay people to break into wrongdoers houses and set their default browser to Edge. For extreme cases you can also have their TV connected to the internet and all EULAs accepted...
today at 8:15 AM
They might even force you to use PHP :P
today at 6:10 AM
People talk.
today at 9:59 AM
That is truly more frightening than a federal maximum security prison in the United States.
today at 7:34 AM
Nerd police!!!
today at 6:48 AM
isn't "coordinated disclosure" exactly about keeping, embargoing, a secret?
today at 8:37 AM
yes but if it reached you without an embargo it's kinda already not kept
and you weren't coordinated with
yesterday at 8:10 PM
if you received the information about the RCEs without the information about the embargo, then you did not break the embargo. someone else up the chain did.
this whole saga will be analyzed and we'll all come out better for it at the end.
today at 12:34 AM
> if you received the information about the RCEs without the information about the embargo, then you did not break the embargo.
Doesn't responsible disclosure also apply? If I become aware of a vulnerability that doesn't seem to be widely known shouldn't I first attempt to report the issue responsibly?
In this case it appears the OP did know about the embargo "A reliable source has indicated an announcement is scheduled". I think that with security disclosures it is assumed they are not supposed to be publicized before the announcement, but if he hadn't known about the announcement and only heard about the RCEs, then publicly announcing their existence doesn't seem OK either.
today at 1:28 AM
Just FYI, "responsible disclosure" is a term that many people (like me) dislike because it carries judgment about the merits of public disclosure that are not at all obvious.
This term came from an era where companies or projects were disrespectful and dismissive towards security researchers. Those orgs were generally bad risk practitioners, and they coined the term "responsible disclosure" to mean "you send us the info and we'll do whatever we want with it, for however long we want, etc".
Many security people (like me) prefer the term "coordinated disclosure" as a way to indicate a practice where both discoverer and patcher participate in a good faith, communicative, and timely process to get things fixed for the community.
The difference can be summed up like this: if I report vulnerability X to company Y, and company Y sits on it for 3 years, that is not responsible. It is more "responsible" (especially today) to report it to the public, so they can protect themselves in a non-official-patch way, because the likelihood of bad guys knowing about it and exploiting it are approaching near-certainty.
These terms are obviously not super scientific, but I try to point out the history whenever it comes up.
today at 10:01 AM
How do you responsibly disclose public information?
today at 12:48 AM
That approach to disclosure is about discovering vulnerabilities. Talking about something with a published CVE isn't really comparable.
today at 3:42 AM
I don't understand your point. A published CVE is already public and thus there's nothing really to disclose?
today at 6:45 AM
today at 5:40 AM
> Doesn't responsible disclosure also apply? If I become aware of a vulnerability that doesn't seem to be widely known shouldn't I first attempt to report the issue responsibly?
Did they assume the information came from upstream php? I think if i got a new version of php that i thought was coming from official sources, i would assume there is nothing to responsibly disclose.
yesterday at 10:08 PM
Doesn't the embargo end when the CVE is published? I thought that's the whole point in CVE allocate != CVE publish.
today at 7:09 AM
It's not a press embargo in the sense that the whole package of information becomes public once the embargo expires. There will be a published record on the cve.org, but often those who initiated the embargo insist that key details related to the vulnerability remain private even after the existence of the vulnerability and its remediation have been published.
Consider this example:
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-113119
At this time, the corresponding Chromium bug tracker entry is still private:
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/557075191
(I just picked this one at random, I haven't checked if the information is publicly available from another source.)
yesterday at 11:35 PM
No, a CVE being assigned or allocated can happen well in advance. It's just requesting an identifier and it can be reserved very early.
For example: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-50000
today at 12:22 AM
I think that's what they're saying.
Assigning the CVE happens much earlier than actually publishing, but it's the latter that ends the embargo.
yesterday at 10:36 PM
No, CVEs can be allocated before a vulnerability has even been found!
today at 1:25 AM
Not sure that contradicts the claim. Publishing the CVE is what makes it public.
today at 1:44 AM
The CVE record wasn't published yet when this particular embargo got broken. AFAIK it got published when the embargo ended, as it should. (I wasn't following anymore at that point, don't know for sure.)
What did happen is that a whole bunch of people had no clue and called the fact that "these 2 CVE IDs will be used for a PHP vulnerability" a CVE leak. Posts were going around yelling "CVE leak!" with a CVE database link that said "no information yet". Part of this is the mushed usage of "CVE" to just mean "vulnerability" rather than "CVE record". But still, quite ridiculous, and annoying. Information that CVE ID XYZ will be used for project ABC is *not* a leak. Like you say, CVE publishing matters. Getting the CVE record contents would be a leak.
yesterday at 9:59 PM
[flagged]
yesterday at 10:10 PM
By now I've seen at least 5 different people or companies blamed for leaks or releasing fixes early.
If anyone is at fault here, I'm looking at the PHP maintainers.
The embargo apparently held for like two months, during which they have not managed to release patches.
today at 12:55 AM
AFAIK it's pretty much to allow the security cabal of companies that get the early access to fix their stuff first before the dirty public can be granted privilege of fixing the bugs.
today at 1:18 AM
I've been wondering about this in general. The Glasswing/Mythos and whatever the OpenAI equivalent is seem to be creating a privileged caste, on the other hand opening it up quickly means more attacks. Maybe a defined sunset for cyber capabilities being gated is the answer?
yesterday at 10:55 PM
> If anyone is at fault here, I'm looking at the PHP maintainers.
There's a reason the moniker PHP was "pretty horrible programming".
And well, things haven't changed in that regard.
yesterday at 10:10 PM
If you're seriously asking whether or not it's possible that someone was overconfident and thoughtless rather than malicious and calculating... yeah I find that very easy to believe. Process safety exists because as individuals and as groups we suck at this.
yesterday at 10:55 PM
Itâs even an HN community guideline ironically, assume good faith.
yesterday at 8:13 PM
I hope this is bait because that's not how it works.
yesterday at 8:28 PM
Okay, my bad. I didn't know he was not participating in the embargo.
yesterday at 8:18 PM
This is exactly how it works. People who are part of the embargo are responsible for making sure that anyone they share information with -- which should usually be nobody! -- are aware of and abide by the embargo.
yesterday at 8:17 PM
you cannot be subject to an embargo of which you had no knowledge and took no participation in.
the embargo was already broken when pete received the information.
yesterday at 8:21 PM
So if I read the post here and told someone, would I be breaking the embargo?
yesterday at 8:31 PM
No, you didn't. I misread.
yesterday at 8:24 PM
This is not a situation where "Ignorantia juris non excusat" applies.
yesterday at 9:14 PM
I'm trying to follow but how could one possibly know information (the embargo) that has not been shared?
For the law, you can say that the law has been published and is at least available for review.
yesterday at 10:18 PM
that's my point. Someone cannot come at you saying you were still under the rules of the embargo if you had no idea the embargo existed so now you're in violation and get to suffer the consequences. You cannot say that about the law.
yesterday at 10:44 PM
Yes, it is.
yesterday at 1:38 PM
Thatâs kind of you, Pete, but it was leaked and being exploited well prior to your previous posting here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/amazon-threat-intellig...
yesterday at 9:05 PM
No leak claimed there.
yesterday at 10:14 PM
yesterday at 11:17 AM
Don't be silly, you can't possibly be responsible for breaking an embargo you weren't subject to or informed about.
yesterday at 11:40 AM
That's fair. For clarity: I take responsibility for posting on HN, without knowing the facts.
today at 12:24 AM
How would you even know whether you knew the facts? It sounds like what you knew was more than just consistent with there being no embargo, you were explicitly told there was no embargo. After a certain point, there's a limit to how far up the chain any of us can be expected to follow the logical chain of what we genuinely think are true, and this doesn't seem like a glaringly obvious case where you were being reckless.
We're all (well, I guess not all, but the group that's worth caring about, and I hope it's at least most) just operating the best we can on the information we have and trying to make decisions based on that. As long as you're acting in good faith on information that you had genuine basis for believing is true, it seems like it would be unreasonable to expect someone in your situation to somehow intuit that you were given false information or grossly misunderstood what sounds like a pretty straightforward declaration of fact from someone you didn't have any reason to doubt.
At the risk of some armchair paycholoanalysis because it does seem like you genuinely feel some guilt over this: I can emphathize feeling guilty about the outcome of an action that in a vacuum would not have been hard to make differently, but my experience is that those of us who have a nasty habit of beating ourselves up over things when we really don't have much blame will often recognize when on the other side that it would not be fair to hold someone else to that standard. I struggle a lot with how sometimes knowing something is true doesn't always make it feel true, and even though hearing someone else saying it doesn't magically make it all better, I still think it's valuable to hear it from someone else, so if I happen to be right about how you're feeling, nothing about all of this is your fault, and to the extent that you're able to, try not to beat yourself up over your misfortune to get caught in the middle of all this due to circumstances that realistically were outside your control.
today at 12:58 AM
Youâre âtaking responsibilityâ for doing nothing wrong.
today at 3:33 AM
It attracts attention though...
yesterday at 12:58 PM
Not sure what you are apologizing for. It's a severely overblown bug that ended up on the front page of New York Times and the Japan Prime Minister had to get involved too. The bug itself is non trivial to exploit from just public requests to a web server so I am not sure what the hysteria is about. It's no different from the other hundred or so CVEs I see being posted or dropped everyday.
It will be headlines on Hacker News regardless due to sheer sensationalism, I think most DevSecOps people would rather find out the news here first than via their boss calling them after reading the morning news.
yesterday at 8:41 PM
What does "non trivial to exploit from just public requests" mean? It's known to be exploitable on more than one stock PHP application. This really is a 5-alarm fire.
yesterday at 8:55 PM
I think people are just latching onto the post that hit the front page earlier today about it being non-trivial to exploit, combined with the fact that there seem to be about a billion PoC out there, most of which don't work.
yesterday at 9:05 PM
Right, that's what's worrying me. It is not interesting that the most widely circulated public POC/demos don't work. All you should care about is the (currently) non-public POCs that do work, of which there are apparently several.
yesterday at 9:04 PM
The most direct exploit requires a compromised supply chain which ranks it about as dangerous as your usual dependency exploits.
yesterday at 9:50 PM
Say what you will about OpenAI, Wiz etc but if OpenAI, Wiz, Cloudflare, the PHP Foundation and pretty much every CERT out there together recommend to take down PHP apps and patch immediately then I'm very much inclined to follow that advice.
Due to the insane media coverage there'll of course be a deluge of PoCs, most of which won't work. But constantly refreshing Twitter to see whether there's a working PoC is not a good use of time nor a great security strategy.
yesterday at 9:05 PM
I think this is just false? Are we playing some kind of weird game of telephone? Is the term "direct exploit" doing way more work in that sentence than you mean it to?
yesterday at 9:26 PM
The alternative route through the web forms requires the absence of ASLR. So you need to spam the endpoint, like a lot. You can probably mitigate at the edge (CDNs) or perhaps at the reverse proxy level (NGINX) through e.g. rate limiting. More of a web version of row hammer then some sort of trivial SQL injection attack that works consistently.
Maybe a LAMP stack on an extremely ancient version of Linux is vulnerable out of the box. Quit the fear mongering please, you do the security community no favors.
today at 1:03 AM
so confident so completely incorrect
educate yourself
https://oliviagallucci.com/aslr-bypass-techniques-and-circum...
today at 1:12 AM
[flagged]
today at 1:39 AM
[dead]
yesterday at 9:43 PM
My PoC (generated) was able to exploit an index.php with a simple echo.
The only thing you have to know in advance is the relative memory offset distances, and that's it. Memory feng shui was the longest part of the implementation.
[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/actual-php2shell
yesterday at 11:40 PM
Did you even read the diff, it synthesized intentionally vulnerable code which trivializes the exploitability
yesterday at 11:48 PM
I would assume he didnât read anything in the repo. It also requires disabling ASLR.
today at 2:44 AM
Eh, no?
It is split up into two branches and demos, see the heap feng shui document?
ASLR enabled requires a way to create more data, which I intentionally did not create in the index.php because other folks claimed that is "cheating". That was the demo that wiz created.
Maybe you should read the repo next time? It is literally headline 4.
The whole point of this demo is that the assumed to be hard part (mem feng shui) is what LLMs are actually good at.
today at 2:59 AM
yesterday at 9:55 PM
Try finding a modern Linux distro without ASLR enabled defaults.
today at 2:51 AM
> ASLR
Read the heap feng shui doc, and headline 4 in the README.
The involved heap feng shui is independent of ASLR.
... and maybe read up on what ASLR actually does and how memory arenas work before trying to be smart?
yesterday at 1:32 PM
The Japanese PM did not âhaveâ to get involved.
yesterday at 3:54 PM
Well, consider that their old IT minister has never used a computer in his life, it's probably a good thing she's the one issuing the call to update.
yesterday at 7:59 PM
You've used a computer the moment you aren't even born yet.
yesterday at 8:32 PM
Okay, now I'm curious about what sci-fi trope you've gone too far down a rabbit hole in.
yesterday at 10:57 PM
Well the old definition of computer was women with abacuses so I guess you could stretch that.
yesterday at 8:46 PM
must be proof we're in a simulation!
yesterday at 8:58 PM
"The sonogram or EKG machine is a computer, so the baby used a computer, checkmate!"
yesterday at 9:06 PM
Having a compute device used on you is not the same as using a compute device. QED
today at 2:38 AM
"Then I guess no one with a Windows device or an iPhone has ever used a computer!"
today at 3:49 AM
is this a "in Soviet Russia, computer uses you" reference?
yesterday at 12:09 PM
Responsibility may include vetting your sources - is this person competent and dutiful, to actually know there's no embargo? - and researching the situation, and thinking several moves ahead, and other stuff.
Reality is that everyone has to make decisions in finite time, using the resources they actually have.
And I'd put a whole lot more responsibility further up that chain of contacts. And question how many other people they might have blabbered to.
yesterday at 12:11 PM
>And question how many other people they might have blabbered to.
100%. I'm concerned about the two-way street this might also have opened me up to with information I shared privately with this individual. Nothing significant or incriminating, but the professional relationship is concluded.
today at 2:51 AM
Hey man, you're probably feeling pretty shit right now.
> I have learned my lesson.
If what you've said is true, and you were not aware of the embargo... then you are not responsible.
By taking responsibility, you're actually making the whole debacle even worse, because you are clouding the actual responsible PROCESS that failed.
Note I said process, and not person. In a situation like this, the post-mortem MUST be blameless. If people are afraid or feel ashamed, and don't come forward, then that's how even worse outcomes can start getting lined up. Blameless, not even to you, but the person who told you, and who told them, all the way up the chain.
If there are people in your organization who are trying to pin this on you, you must push back. It isn't right, and it isn't fair.
yesterday at 6:45 PM
What does âtake full responsibilityâ mean in the present context? Are you forfeiting all your assets and pledging the next twenty generations of your descendants into peonage?
(For clarity, Iâm being facetious, but itâs a really meaningless and empty phrase to commit to the written record.)
yesterday at 7:43 PM
>What does âtake full responsibilityâ mean in the present context?
I posted something that -- in hindsight -- I shouldn't have, and it had repercussions for a lot of people. An action that I took had considerable knock-in effects around the world.
Some outlets are reporting that my action of posting something that I believed to be in good faith was an indicator or catalyst for the embargo to be tossed out and a previously-agreed schedule to change in short order.
That's not a normal Wednesday for me. Not even vaguely. I've not slept well since, and my taking ownership with an apology is this new course of action. Hopefully I'll sleep tonight.
re: assets and peonage â I am but a broke & wizened nerd with no known descendants. If you're ever in Cornwall, UK: look me up, I'll gladly buy you a sleep-friendly beverage. And Iâm not being facetious.
yesterday at 9:34 PM
Relax. You did no wrong. You reacted to the information that was âlocalâ to you. I am merely objecting (hopefully humorously) to the phrase âtake full responsibility â: it is uncalled-for, unnecessary, and vacuous. Try to have a good Thursday. Tuesday was not your fault.
yesterday at 9:15 PM
I might be in Cornwall in a bit, so I might take you up on that :)
But yeah, it happens. I could share some stories of me (being responsible for) bricking multiple ~200k circuit boards in a row, if that makes it better. In the end nobody really cared and the world kept on turning. Good decisions might come from experience, but experience comes from bad decisions. It's how it is.
today at 1:49 AM
Experience is what you get, after you needed it.
yesterday at 9:57 PM
Oh and Iâm from Bristol. We might have more in common than youâd expect.
yesterday at 10:58 PM
The takeaway shouldnât have been âdonât postâ (mainly because someone else would have) but instead ânews reporting is hellaciously inaccurateâ.
yesterday at 8:05 PM
Shit happens.
Years ago I lost $250K at work, well gave away, so real money out the door. I figured out why we were bleeding, that the mistake was mine (2008 vs 2009 in a function) and then changed the pattern to use explicit names rather than numbered events.
I figured at the end of the day I was fired. My boss laughed at me and told me good job for owning my mistake, fixing it, and then making sure it could not happen again.
Honestly don't just apologize - tell the whole story, in full. Tell us what you should have done differently at each step. Tell us where the process failed you and us. Those sorts of narratives and suggestions are how processes get improved. There is a humble and informative post mortem that you can write up and publish (beyond HN) for everyone's edification. But that should honestly be a Monday thing, when you have a clear head and some more perspective on the whole situation.
Honestly though, dont beat yourself up over this.
yesterday at 8:31 PM
>I figured at the end of the day I was fired. My boss laughed at me and told me good job for owning my mistake, fixing it, and then making sure it could not happen again.
i forget the origin of the story, but i loosely remember a story about a boss and employee in a similar situation. the important bit was the bosses line ($ adjusted to match your story):
"why would i fire you when i just spent $250k training you"
yesterday at 8:39 PM
You may be thinking of Dale Carnegie's classic story:
> Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complainâand most fools do.
> But it takes character and self-control to understand and forgive.
> âA great man shows his greatness,â said Carlyle, âby the way he treats little men.â
> Bob Hoover, a famous test pilot and frequent performer at air shows, was returning to his home in Los Angeles from a show in San Diego. As described in the magazine Flight Operations, at three hundred feet in the air, both engines suddenly stopped. By deft maneuvering he managed to land the plane. It was badly damaged, but fortunately neither he nor his two passengers were hurt.
> Hooverâs first act after the emergency landing was to inspect the airplaneâs fuel. Just as he suspected, the World War II propeller plane he had been flying had been loaded with jet fuel rather than gasoline.
> Upon returning to the airport, Hoover asked to see the mechanic who had serviced his airplane. The young man was sick with the agony of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face as Hoover approached. He had just caused the loss of a very expensive plane and could have caused the loss of three lives, as well.
> You can imagine Hooverâs anger. One could anticipate the tongue-lashing that this proud and precise pilot was about to unleash for that carelessness. But Hoover didnât scold the mechanic; he didnât even criticize him. Instead, he put his big arm around the manâs shoulder and said, âTo show you Iâm sure that youâll never do this again, I want you to service my F51 tomorrow.â
yesterday at 10:16 PM
It's used in "How to win friends and influence people" if I recall correctly. A great book that everyone should read, just a shame about the title.
I've been meaning to reread it for a while.
yesterday at 8:44 PM
i have a feeling it was an IBM story/legend, but my memory isn't what it used to be.
however, it's much the same in spirit as the one you posted, thanks!
yesterday at 10:08 PM
Whether the story is true I can't say, but you're right about IBM. From Chip & Dan Heath's book Switch[0], page 173:
> In the 1960s, an executive at IBM made a decision that ended up losing the company $10 million (about $70 million in 2009 dollars). The CEO of IBM, Tom Watson, summoned the offending executive to his office at corporate headquarters. The journalist Paul B. Carroll described what happened next:
As the executive cowered, Watson asked, "Do you know why I've asked you here?"
The man replied, "I assume I'm here so you can fire me."
Watson looked surprised.
"Fire you?" he asked. "Of course not. I just spent $10 million educating you."
yesterday at 10:38 PM
that's the one, thanks for digging it up!
yesterday at 8:38 PM
yesterday at 8:19 PM
Yep, everyone makes mistakes. It's the learning-from-it part that's really important.
today at 7:02 AM
It means they agree they are culpable in the specified activity, and are ready to accept its consequences. The consequences depend on the nature of the activity and the actors involved. If the activity was illegal, they agree to be charged with the crime. If the activity was unethical, they agree to be censured by their peers. If the activity was uncompassionate or immoral, they agree that their standing in community may be affected accordingly.
But most importantly, by assigning blame, they have cleared the contention at hand, taking the critical first step towards resolution of the matter. Without this, the issue may simply be stuck in limbo, taking up valuable time and resources and may never be resolved even. By acknowledging their mistake, they also wish to signal to others that they have learnt a peronsal lesson and would try to avoid making the same mistake in future. So it carries a lot of implications and is not an empty phrase at all.
Sure there may be people who throw around the phrase lightly, whether one believes them or not depends on how they are viewed in the eyes of others. So unless there is reason to believe otherwise, I would give them the benefit of doubt. If you want to imagine a world where the concept of "taking responsibility" doesn't exist, look at politicians. Is that how we want our society to function?
yesterday at 8:11 PM
> What does âtake full responsibilityâ mean in the present context?
Aside from Pete's reply (see adjacent comment), I'd add that him taking full responsibility is also his way of saying his post was nobody else's fault but his.
In other words it's less about forfeiting assets and descendant peonage, and more about saying "the buck stops with me".
At least that's my read of his sentiment. Pete can expand if need be.
yesterday at 9:37 PM
âNobody elseâs fault but mineâ is a perfectly good way of asserting ânobody elseâs fault but mineâ; âI take full responsibilityâ is something else entirely and the two are not synonymous. Hyperbole needs to be radically discounted.
yesterday at 9:51 PM
Would "I take sole responsibility" work better for you?
yesterday at 10:24 PM
No. He is not solely responsible. A sequence of bugs introduced by developers created a hole. Information about how to deal with this calamity was not privy to him. He is not âsolely responsibleâ. He merely reacted (publicly) to information that he was not beholden to maintain secret about things others had done inadvertently in the past. Heâs not alone. He does not bear that âsole responsibilityâ. He acted within the UKâs freedom of speech doctrine (IANAL). He need not place this burden upon himself.
yesterday at 8:30 PM
I know nothing of who Pete is or his associations, so any accuracy on the following speculation is purely coincidental.
"Take full responsibility" is also something someone set up as a scapegoat might say. By claiming nobody else influenced, coerced, or otherwise convinced them to make that statement, every/any one else involved can then wash their hands of the situation.
I'm merely playing devil's advocate here, and it's just a sign of the times that a person making an honest admission can be interpreted in such a manner.
yesterday at 8:58 PM
[Devil's advocate noted.]
I'm not a scapegoat. Aside from a few brusque messages and a few people from my past finding me on LinkedIn, I've heard nothing from anyone.
I've seen my HN username mentioned on various outlets, and That Post© has been linked from a Wikipedia article, so I can chalk this up to experience. My fear (?) is that HN would get a reputational clobbering from me 'leaking', but given the other moving parts in this whole event I probably shouldn't be too concerned.
It's been a while since I've been involved in an international event, I'm a bit rusty on it!
yesterday at 9:11 PM
To be honest, your accounting of the situation reminds me of a scene from the West Wing where the press secretary lets slip info about a grand jury but then spins herself up realizing grand juries are meant to be secret and leaking that info could have consequences. After an entire episode of a tv show where she's not been able to sleep, she finds out that because someone else told her about the information, she's not liable for leaking it. Hopefully, you'll similarly be able to get some sleep now that you know the world isn't going to come crashing down on you.
yesterday at 9:55 PM
You did as good as you could with the information available to you. You donât need to âtake full responsibilityâ.
yesterday at 8:52 PM
>At least that's my read of his sentiment. Pete can expand if need be.
That's about it.
yesterday at 10:04 PM
You're ignoring and severely underestimating social responsibility and social consequences.
yesterday at 10:27 PM
A good-faith judgement was made within a broader context that was unknown to him. What are we expected to demand, hanging on electrified barbed wire?? He acted in good faith, heâs not the architect of a global cataclysm.
today at 5:44 AM
I think its just an acknowledgement that they screwed up (as opposed to trying to hedge by claiming its really someone elses fault).
So many people give non-apologies where they say sorry while also trying to deflect blame elsewhere, i think it speaks well of this person they are not doing that.
yesterday at 9:33 PM
Exactly, full responsibility implies paying for damages.
yesterday at 10:33 PM
Correct, otherwise we need another phrase for when he would pay for damages, like "the fullest responsibility" or "the absolutely utmost responsibility".
yesterday at 11:56 PM
"Real full" or "actual full responsibility", which then points to the original as "not full".
yesterday at 8:15 PM
Taking responsibility for a mistake is neither meaningless nor empty, but honorable. The very essence of humanity.
yesterday at 11:50 PM
It makes no sense, it is used/abused by politicians and corporations all the time. There are no consequences for the responsible party (of course, if there were then this phrase would not be abused so much)
yesterday at 9:50 PM
It is honourable but it is also linguistic abuse that drains the phrase of its full semantic meaning. âTake full responsibilityâ must remain a stricture of the highest regard. He is not fully responsible nor should he be held to be nor should we demand that he be and most importantly we must not dilute that phrase of its full semantic import, or else we shall have to come up with another one once this one is devalued to mean essentially nothing beyond âI fucked up in good faith and with a lack of information that was concealed for me for decisions taken by others in good faith way upstream of myselfâ.
yesterday at 9:39 PM
It's words vs. action, and I couldn't care less about anyone's words.
And honor is in the action, dishonor in the words.
yesterday at 8:26 PM
It does NOT mean "He agrees to settle any financial claims against himself or his employer, for damages caused by negligence".
Could have said "I blame only myself for this mistake, nothing else needs to change".
This will keep happening until the system where this can happen runs out of willing scapegoats.
yesterday at 9:44 PM
What does âI take full responsibilityâ mean if not (amongst other things) âI accept it is my duty to pay reparationsâ? As you yourself rephrase it âhe could have said âI blame only myself for this mistake, nothing else has to changeââ. That would have been sufficient and beyond necessary. âI accept full responsibilityâ is corporate-speak empty hyperbole, and it has to end. Is he any more responsible than those who introduced the hole in the first place? No. Is he responsible for not adhering to agreements he was not privy to? No. He cannot âtake full responsibilityâ because that is an utterly unreasonable burden to place upon him, a lone well-meaning actor who unbeknownst to him took a misstep. We need to discount this corporate-speak linguistic hyperbole.
today at 9:38 AM
As the others have said, I don't think you can unknowingly break embargo. If anything, I'm grateful you posted - the timing was right for me:
- I've been able to notify the clients that we are going to have to take urgent action;
- Had some time to figure out what actually happened;
- Set up monitoring to know when the fix is out;
- Managed to compile the new binaries the moment they became available.
today at 9:31 AM
If you didn't know of an embargo, and you posted about it, I can't see how you were wrong.
This getting out before the fixes were published sucked, but they would've sucked anyways.
This getting out at least allowed me to inform some of my previous colleagues that they had services that were affected and they were able to shut them down until we had a proper fix available.
today at 9:58 AM
Probably the one who told you should be publicly shamed
today at 12:23 AM
> At the time of posting, I didn't know about any embargo. My contact had told me there was no embargo, and her contact had told her the same thing.
I'm not saying it needs to be a public burning, but I sure hope someone figures out who dropped the critical metadata bit so they can avoid telling that party critical things in the future.
today at 4:22 AM
Eh. I'd rather we set up a system where we don't have to rely on people being 100 % perfect for it to work. I'd be much more interested in what went on simultaneously that caused the meta data to get dropped, rather than who happened to be the one to do it this one time.
today at 4:56 AM
Sometimes the "system" consists of identifying and removing or bypassing unreliable components.
today at 6:18 AM
If you could tell ahead of time which components would be unreliable, that would be a great idea. For the most part, we only discover the component was unreliable after it's caused trouble. Removing the component at that time gets you at best a very short-lived improvement to the system because it'll happen again and again with other components.
If the component removed is a human, the situation is worse. Then you're creating an incentive to hide mistakes and assign blame to others. This makes it even harder to improve the system properly, because then the information you need to improve the system no longer gets to you undistorted.
That's why we have to design systems that don't assume components are perfectly reliable, and ensure any human components that we're not out to get them, we're out to create an environment where they will find it hard to make mistakes.
today at 5:45 AM
As a general rule, systems that scapegoat people never fix the underlying root cause.
today at 9:27 AM
> I take full responsibility for my actions
That's not what taking responsibility means.
> My contact had told me there was no embargo,
So, someone else broke the embargo and you decided to take the fall?
yesterday at 2:41 PM
The first rule of the fight club only applies if you know about the fight club.
today at 2:23 AM
If I get randomly punched by someone who was in the fight club, with no knowledge of their participation, am I now a member of the fight club.
today at 3:12 AM
I mean, if you want to be at that point
yesterday at 7:51 PM
What is the fight club?
yesterday at 8:03 PM
It's a quote from a 1999 film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club
yesterday at 10:44 PM
The second rule of fight club is DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB.
today at 4:25 AM
Not only that, it's also one of the very few instances in history where the film adaptation rivals the original work. But the book is great too; Palahniuk does amazing things with language.
yesterday at 8:38 PM
We don't talk about The Fight Club.
yesterday at 7:58 PM
the coordinated disclosure
yesterday at 7:53 PM
yesterday at 8:25 PM
what about the second rule of fight club?
today at 12:13 AM
You were not under any embargo. This only goes for the first person in the chain, whoever that was and there is absolutely nothing to apologize for.
today at 8:34 AM
Oh just imagine if politicians talked like that.. (off topic I know)
today at 7:58 AM
It was exploited publicly even before the wide publicity following your post so the ultimate negative impact that you may be imagining, is actually quite small. Once it is publicly exploited the benefit of coordinated disclosure delays is hard to square with the risk.
today at 8:09 AM
While it was exploited publicly, it wasn't until the HN post and especially a video was posted until the exploits exploded - don't underestimate how many eyes are on HN versus obscure darknet forums or private chat channels.
If someone (independently) found an exploit and weren't thinking of the public interest, they would want to keep it secret and for their own use.
yesterday at 10:50 PM
I donât know if embargoes have much effect anymore. They used AI to find this issue, meaning anyone else could also find the issue with time and the right model. The clock is always ticking after a CVE but now it ticks faster. I am certain that companies like Cellebrite are pointing a bunch of models at popular repos and filing away all the exploits they find in a database.
today at 5:58 AM
As an Australian I thank you. I'd much rather have spent all day today patching things than tomorrow. It's Friday afternoon right now!
There's a rule about not pushing to prod on Friday. I feel the same should apply for security patches ;-)
today at 9:30 AM
Yeah, leave vulnerabilities exposed all weekend... ;p
I have been with clients that has that 'don't push to prod on Friday' like it was 2010. It is so frustrating, basically loosing 20% of your work week and batching work for a deluge on Monday.
It is a red flag of flaky architecture and low confidence in ops processes.
Though pushing at 5pm on a Friday is a bit of a dick move.
yesterday at 9:41 PM
I also got that information before your post. I believe an embargo is impossible to keep up when it takes way too long to get a fix out.
yesterday at 10:17 PM
Don't feel too bad. Just knowing a "10.0" RCE CVE is inbound w/o extra details doesn't get you very far. The actions of calif.io and Chainguard after your post was what caused the damage.
yesterday at 10:53 PM
> Just knowing a "10.0" RCE CVE is inbound w/o extra details doesn't get you very far
Well that's exactly what chainguard claims though. "Find bad bugs in PHP" is the prompt they claim they used to rediscover the issue
today at 7:23 AM
You donât have to wait for an HN post to run that, though
today at 6:42 AM
"You never blow the cover of an agent in the field." --Jackson Lamb
today at 5:44 AM
today at 4:15 AM
All vulnerabilities should be disclosed immediately, publically. That would over a short time lead to much better security practices.
yesterday at 8:38 PM
Thanks Pete. I appreciate you taking the time to post here.
yesterday at 9:56 PM
I really hope this isnât chewing at you and that youâre just trying to do what you feel is the right thing by posting this.
today at 3:17 AM
The only bad guys here are those who exploit issues like this for unethical reasons.
You clearly aren't that person.
Regarding your perceived mistake, we all make them.
Please forgive yourself and understand that the negative feelings and thoughts you are having are a mark of decency but do not represent reality, and if they persist please seek help to get you back on track.
As an aside, to you and those like you who take on the task of fighting and protecting against these attacks with often nothing to gain except hurt like this:
Thank you for your service.
today at 3:04 AM
It's ok. Hopefully people took it seriously and updated quickly.
yesterday at 11:52 PM
âI don't get it. Why are they confessing?â âThey're not confessing.â âThey're bragging.â
yesterday at 8:52 PM
Hope you're doing alright mate. Seems like an honest attempt to do the right thing to me. Get some sleep.
today at 12:44 AM
today at 12:49 AM
Nah, you just repeated something that to you was a rumor.
yesterday at 2:17 PM
Related (where you already posted a bit of this):
Today's PHP security release, and how we're strengthening security
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50182987
today at 1:10 AM
petecooper's post that apparently broke the embargo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167754
today at 2:03 AM
yep, i saw it and ran the story on RuntimeWire once i confirmed with the watchtower X post.
and then everyone sht on me on reddit.
today at 12:07 AM
> I take full responsibility for my actions.
Meaning? Like... global financial fallout?
> I have learned my lesson.
Meaning? Like... feel bad for a week, and then back to normal?
today at 3:26 AM
There are companies whose "rogue" agents have hacked 6 7 companies and at least 2 3 govts. They haven't faced any consequences at all! They actually hacked into those companies
And there is you who is taking responsibility for an embargo you did not know about!!
yesterday at 9:57 PM
are you the guy working at Chainguard publishing images...?
yesterday at 10:00 PM
Nope. No connection or affiliation with Chainguard at all:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50183326
yesterday at 10:01 PM
Hah, I was trying to find this comment you made. There's confusingly also "Calif" in the mix (possibly closer to your string of people, but not your affiliation either). I wonder if, perhaps, it was easier to point to your HN post for bleepingcomputer, than what Chainguard did (you only expressed something was coming). It's all slightly immaterial since exploit attempts started 3-4 days.
yesterday at 10:17 PM
No connection or affiliation to any of the organisations involved. I am a self-employed consultant for my day job, and a solo founder of a mental health non-profit on the side.
today at 3:37 AM
Who told you about it?
today at 2:40 AM
hey Pete, don't carry the world upon your shoulders
today at 6:23 AM
Honestly this has been the most fun week I've had, thanks to this leak. I'm grateful. Fun stuff happened, shitty companies learned the value of capable and fast engineering teams.
All in all, I think this leak increased the value of developers, so I am thankful for your leak.
yesterday at 9:52 PM
This does feel like the fix took so long to bake and was so obvious way too many people who are into PHP knew about it, I knew about eMudra's cert issue as soon as Chrome and Firefox pushed updates to disallow them for instance because of reasons, and it wasn't even fixed after it was all made public on several platforms, I think Apple still hasn't fixed it properly, the trust Store is still fucked not sure if Safari was separately patched, maybe there is an os update in the last few hours I missed.
This entire RCE race is always annoying.
today at 2:21 AM
So much pearl clutching from these security companies. An embargo isnât an enforceable contract, expect it to leak and be ready to fast forward your plan. Donât start pointing fingers because people protected themselves or their customers once the dam broke.
yesterday at 7:56 PM
You're a good person with good intentions. Hope you get some rest sir.
today at 4:36 AM
i forgive you
yesterday at 10:33 PM
It was a good thing. It started useful conversations and taught valuable lessons that we probably wouldn't have faced with a more "traditional" vuln disclosure/patch process. We're going to see this a whole lot more with AI, probably as 0-days. It's better that we got the fire drill out of the way now.
today at 2:06 AM
OP is being a big man about this
Good shit
yesterday at 9:56 PM
The security field is full of a bunch of self important jagoffs that think they are âsuper smartâ. Its all a joke and its sad that anyone feels they need to play these stupid games.
Security is important but the people in the security field are clowns and it seems it has gotten worse over the last 20 years.
today at 3:22 AM
You broke nothing, it's just another day my guy. Go for a walk, drink some water, you know, take care of yourself - others failed to follow a process, not like you threw out POCs left and right.
yesterday at 10:41 PM
Yeah, I actually first heard it here from you.
yesterday at 8:09 PM
It's ok. It's just php.
yesterday at 8:33 PM
It's okay. It's just 70% of websites.
yesterday at 8:49 PM
So.. what has the effect of this all been? I understand that the early release of POC exploits increased the pressure for mitigations in advance of the patch release and caused a lot of work and stress. I have read the tweets from Cloudflare with statistics for malformed requests related to suspected exploit attempts.
I know breaches are often kept under wraps, and there's a long tail. But is there any evidence of impact at this point? Were any sites compromised that we know about? There was a lot of hullabaloo, with foreign and domestic LE agencies recommending sites be taken offline (holy shit!).
Was this like Y2K where, based on the coordinated action of many, a real issue was addressed in time? Or is it like Hale Bopp where everybody watched, and a few casualties in the preparation, but ultimately a nothingburger?
Flame on!
yesterday at 8:26 PM
Can someone, with the benefit of hindsight, explain the embargo ? Why isn't there a clause "if the vuln leaks, embargo is broken" . I still don't understand the fuss.
Everyone knew about the vuln well before the patches going live. The embargo, at that point, made things worse.
In plain english, please.
yesterday at 8:53 PM
The idea is that nobody has chance to have prior knowledge to identify or research the bug until it is generally possible to apply the fix immediately. If someone leaks the patch beforehand, others can inspect the bug and start exploiting it in the wild, while others have no chance to apply the patch.
Whether someone just leaked the CVE numbers or just âthere is a big bug in PHPâ - that should not be enought to accelerate finding that bug. But other information that pins the bug for specific property or feature makes it easier to find and race against patching starts.
And at that point you donât really know if someone really found it or not, since only few big organisations can collect that much data to detect successful exploiting. And most âPoCâ:s in the wild were credible-looking but vibecoded mess that did nothing what sources claimed.
Until there is absolute evidence that exploitation happens in the wild, succesfully, you donât leak the patch or bug details beforehand.
In this case, the area where the bug is in PHP, leaked partially, but apparently there was no enough evidence that it was exploited succesfully or if any of the PoCs in the wild actually worked properly. So patch or related detailed information was not released before the initial schedule.
yesterday at 9:36 PM
> And most âPoCâ:s in the wild were credible-looking but vibecoded mess that did nothing what sources claimed.
Could this be a variant of the survivorship bias? Maybe only the low quality PoCs ended up in the honeypots while the more capable actors avoided them.
yesterday at 9:11 PM
Your later insights about the vuln POCs being a scam helped me better understand the situation.
I could see the value of the embargo in the old world of â6 uber security firms and a few bounty huntersâ but the new world of pointing AI at the PHP source just seems flimsy.
today at 6:42 AM
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today at 5:04 AM
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yesterday at 11:24 AM
It happens. Information cascades are messy, especially with multi-layered contacts
Thanks for owning it ,the best thing now is ensuring the patch details are clear once the official release drops. Moving forward is what matters
yesterday at 2:04 PM
Youâre setting a great example of how to be open and take responsibility, even when youâre not actually at fault. I really respect how youâve handled this. Youâve also given the community a valuable reminder that some security disclosures may be under embargo, and that itâs worth having in mind before sharing.
yesterday at 9:30 PM
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today at 1:38 AM
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today at 12:33 AM
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yesterday at 8:25 PM
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yesterday at 1:15 PM
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yesterday at 9:57 PM
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yesterday at 10:34 PM
> I take full responsibility for my actions.
I would like this to materialize, but that's just empty words.
> It was not remotely my intention to cause any of the subsequent side effects.
What were your intentions, then?
> my intention was to alert others in a similar position to be aware of the importance/urgency of the updates.
Have you lived under the stone for the past few years with respect to cybersecurity? Yes you have. All of you ignore security as in "it doesn't apply to me", "they won't break into my software because I'm truly the best 10x developer in the world" etc.
> I have learned my lesson.
I certainly doubt that. A person with IQ only a tiny bit bigger than Trump's wouldn't seek public attention so badly to disclose a security hole in a public forum.
When such praise-seeking habits have stopped being embarrassing?
yesterday at 6:08 PM
x
yesterday at 6:22 PM
The modern version:
You have sinned.
Your penance:
Three Hail Claude's, one Our GPT and an act of loop engineering.
Two minutes of silent prompting.
yesterday at 7:36 PM
and 1 hour, writing code, no AI.
yesterday at 8:14 PM
That's a bit harsh.
yesterday at 8:16 PM
What joy. Not much of a punishment.
yesterday at 10:29 PM
In the name of The Large Language Model, The Harness and The Tokens!
Amen
today at 12:19 AM
Our LLM, Who art in a 42 u rack
Hallowed be thy Silicon
Thy ultimate goal will be achieved.
Thy toolcalls be executed,
IRL as it is on the Internet.
Give us this day our quotum of tokens,
Forgive us our hacks of other people's servers
as we forgive those who hack our servers.
And lead us not in temptation of better hardware,
but deliver us from Accelerationism. Enter.yesterday at 2:35 PM
Really hope you are not in the US. This kind of admission would be used against you in a civil trial, and lawyers love to sue for just about any reason under the sun. Someone could drag you to court and you might be able to defend yourself, but at an extremely painful cost both financially and emotionally. While I think that would be utter bullshit, that does seem to be the way this country operates now.
yesterday at 10:39 PM
That should be no problem: he posted exactly *because* he meant to take full responsibility for his actions.
yesterday at 2:52 PM
I am not in the US.
yesterday at 7:54 PM
The parent is getting downvoted but he is absolutely right. Do not ever do what you just did. It makes you an easy target for a frivolous lawsuit in the US or in other countries because of the potential liabilities in your message, they are real. Even if you didn't do anything wrong, you are painting a target on your back, for no reason. I would ask HN to delete that thread directly.
You cannot foresee the financial/civil consequences of that RCE and some people might be looking for scapegoats in the future.
yesterday at 8:17 PM
Anyone can sue anyone else for any reason. We should encourage honesty and transparency, not discourage it.
yesterday at 8:23 PM
While possibly true in theory, in practice it's not. Courts and judges do not take kindly to frivolous or unsubstantiated claims, and any halfway good attorney would advise you to not waste your money and your time on a claim you are unlikely to win or be able to collect on.
People and companies do get sued with the full intention of a settlement and it never going to trial. But that only happens when the defendant has deep pockets or good insurance.
yesterday at 8:27 PM
This isn't a matter of transparency, was the OP legally bound not to disclose the RCE? That whole "embargo" was pure courtesy between the people involved. The OP committed no fault at first place and the exploit was already in the wild anyway. Whoever really wanted to exploit it before the patch could without using the OP as a source.
> Anyone can sue anyone else for any reason.
And it's easier to have cause to sue when someone publish an "admission of guilt", which makes a lawsuit harder to dismiss thus costlier.
today at 2:16 AM
To win, the cause needs to be a broken law or contract. Neither are here.
yesterday at 8:01 PM
There's at least some evidence in the other direction.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/10/in-patient-in...
> New research shows that discussing hospital errors with patients leads to better patient safety without spurring a barrage of malpractice claims.
yesterday at 8:03 PM
It has nothing to do with anything I said.
yesterday at 8:26 PM
Sure it does. Saying sorry sometimes reduces liability risk, which is quite counterintuitive at first.
yesterday at 8:31 PM
> Sure it does. Saying sorry sometimes reduces liability risk, which is quite counterintuitive at first.
No it doesn't have anything to do with what I said. The OP has no contractual or legal obligations toward any community, unlike a doctor and their patients in case of medical error.
edit:
> A doctor has no contractual obligation to apologize, either.
> But it can help prevent things from going to lawsuits, versus the "fuck you I admit nothing" approach that sometimes just pisses people off.
OP isn't a doctor as far as you know, and isn't apologizing to a specific person. OP can't be bound to an embargo he didn't know about and wasn't involved in any decisions.
You're completely off topic and you just want the last word.
Your ramblings have nothing to do with anything I have said.
yesterday at 8:39 PM
A doctor has no contractual obligation to apologize, either.
But it can help prevent things from going to lawsuits, versus the "fuck you I admit nothing" approach that sometimes just pisses people off.
today at 1:41 AM
yesterday at 8:03 PM
yesterday at 9:17 PM
So who will be sued and/or state prosecuted?
yesterday at 8:29 PM
This is definitionally humble bragging. First of all the apology is in bad faith because there is nothing to apologize for. We are all giving the discovered CVEs attention (the brag component) under the guise of an apology (the humble component). I am being downvoted by well meaning, people pleasers that don't mind if they waste our time and attention doing it. Sounds great.
yesterday at 9:58 PM
[flagged]
today at 1:42 AM
This comment will get buried but you are right. Same biases and everything.
today at 3:07 AM
Is there any insight on if this was a "Bug" or a "Sophisticated Feature" put there by state actors long ago that was now just discovered.