So I have a small web app I made. I didn’t really advertise much because there’s a lot of things I wanna fix in it and I don’t have the time. But I did tell a few classmates about it.
Last few days I noticed it had been running slowly. Until one day it just stopped working. I checked the server logs and there was a background worker trying and failing to insert some data into the db on loop because of a bug I didn’t notice. The data it was trying to insert was spam so I knew this was an intentional thing. I took the server down and in the process accidentally deleted all the logs. Oops.
So I go and check the database and the user who inserted the spam data used their actual email. I google it, find their GitHub, their twitter, and their fiverr which has their actual name and picture. I search their name in my university system and find them. It’s someone I don’t know. Someone who heard from a classmate I told about it.
Fixed the bug now, banned the account, removed the spam. I guess you could say they did me a favor catching the bug but they could’ve just told me about it lol.
The only question left is: should I contact them? Send them a subtle 'I know what you did" message on the uni portal?
Bring your evidence to the CS Professor. See what they think.
Yeah generally it’s in bad form to mess with other people’s projects without their permission at university. CS Professor probably won’t be impressed.
a) The logs were deleted, so there isn’t much evidence left. b) We don’t even know if this is a university project and not just a side project.
It’s not a university project. I’m obviously not gonna report it to anyone.
The logs were deleted but the database entries remain, tied to their username and confirmed email.
Even if the project wasn’t for university, it’s still yours. And the other student probably broke your schools code of conduct by doing what they did. You should still inform if not the dean of the program, then at least your professor. What’s to say this person isn’t also going around and fucking with other people’s projects?
Might be able to recover the logs with
testdisk. The email and other info might be enough. If you do get your logs back might impress the CS Prof. Shows willingness to figure shit out when things go wrong.To me, what they did shows intent to commit a crime if not the crime itself. Possibly legal offences likely wont be taken lightly.
If your gonna hack shit it better be your own in a lab or have consent from the party involved
How can you determine that someone didn’t use their info as subterfuge? It sounds like most people could find that information and use it. You’ll need a little more evidence.
Personally, I’d ask them if they want to pen test my next application and see how they respond.
What do you mean? If their email is confirmed, then I assume only they have access to it. Is there something I’m missing?
Perhaps it’s something that I’m missing. What do you mean when you say their email is confirmed?
Usually when this happens, it’s a result of someone taking advantage of an application vulnerability, e.g. sql injection. Sometimes it’s more serious, like a script uploaded and a privilege escalation to execute it. The email value written to your database could be anything.
Not to condescend, but this is a good learning experience. If they were able to write to your db, they could likely also read from it, dump the whole thing and harvest the data.
They did not gain access to the db. They just inserted some garbage data that due to a bug in my code caused a background worker to try to insert some invalid data to the db and fail on loop, hogging network resources until eventually the main server couldn’t serve anymore.
When I say their email is confirmed, I mean the email they used to sign up is presumably one they have access to because they clicked on the confirmation link with a token sent to their email. The data they inserted is tied to that account with a foreign key.
No SQL injection or anything like that was done. It was more them triggering a bug more than anything. But it’s still clearly intentional because the data they inserted is spam about forex trading with no spaces (which is what caused the error, long story). My code is open source so presumably they knew that would happen.
Gotcha. Then maybe it is time for them to have a conversation with the friendly network administrator. You might have lost your logs, but university network appliances usually log alot.
Agreed. Mostly because there’s a risk that individual will continue down the offensive security route without guidance and end up a blackhat.