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chrisdh79 OP t1_j249zs8 wrote

From the article: A bug in Google Home smart speaker allowed installing a backdoor account that could be used to control it remotely and to turn it into a snooping device by accessing the microphone feed.

A researcher discovered the issue and received $107,500 for responsibly reporting it to Google last year. Earlier this week, the researcher published technical details about the finding and an attack scenario to show how the flaw could be leveraged.

While experimenting with his own Google Home mini speaker, the researcher discovered that new accounts added using the Google Home app could send commands to it remotely via the cloud API.

Using a Nmap scan, the researcher found the port for the local HTTP API of Google Home, so he set up a proxy to capture the encrypted HTTPS traffic, hoping to snatch the user authorization token.

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Autski t1_j24gkz6 wrote

Love their incentive program to pay guys who find bugs like that.

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asdaaaaaaaa t1_j24nc8i wrote

Bug/vulnerability bounties are a pretty good way to getting results, especially for those hard to figure out ones that deal with a specific issue. Otherwise, there's a much bigger incentive to sell the vulnerability to someone else, or use it for nefarious reasons.

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imeeme t1_j24w9h0 wrote

Smart way to avoid much larger liabilities.

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laffer1 t1_j26lhp6 wrote

The downside is that people expect it now from everyone. When you run a small open source project and folks try to hold you hostage to pay, it sucks. Plus a lot of folks do scans all the time hoping to find a vulnerability against your servers

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ImN0tAsian t1_j279uw3 wrote

Well, the bug-rewarding is in response to extortion via ransomware, so it goes both ways, sadly. I'd rather pay a smaller sum to reward white hats than risk losing an operation.

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