For example -- let's say you offer $100 in free AWS credits by signing up to your platform. Expect a malicious user to eventually come to your platform, realize they can resell those $100 in credits for $50, and start using your platform for their own gain. Unless the mechanisms you add in place to reduce fraud / second sign ups / etc is greater than the value that they are receiving ($50), they will continue.
With sites where the platform is free, the math almost always makes sense for these malicious users to eventually abuse. In this case it was leveraging the email reputation of another domain at no cost to their own (along with the added value of anyone getting phished), but on other sites it's public profiles being used for backlinks / spam, etc.
I threw part of it into pangram to get a second opinion:
https://www.pangram.com/history/8d6a7de3-86ac-4ce0-86c5-4f93...
> There was no exploit. No vulnerability disclosure. No CVE for me to write. The attacker filled out my signup form 942 times, made 942 workspaces, sent 942 batches of about a hundred invitations each, and stopped. They used my tool exactly as designed. The design was just bad enough that the tool was good for phishing.
That made me think if the project is entirely vibecoded as well.
Even for a project manager without network access, hosting flawed software on your LAN can only get you so far.
I will say, I've grown bored of folks complaining about AI generated content. But, to each their own. Good luck storming the castle.
The 14000 sends over 3 hours (< 1/s) makes it sound more-than-human speed. E.g. automated.
Wondering if LLM-assisted vulnerability hunting will lead to the same gains in scale for bad actors wanting to find spammable channels in applications. The barrier to entry becomes so much greater because any small project, once found, can be wrung dry of all its trust signals by third parties
a) having an email-sending product typically meant you had a project with a lot of effort invested into it as well as knowledge
b) the models, tokens spent and review done differs in the world of vibecoding and there is a race to the bottom to produce, produce, produce. Quantity > quality
1. You are not alone, this happens at a large scale across the board with companies of all sizes.
2. More than likely the abuser did not do it manually, more than likely they automated it
3. As a thoughtful business one may have rolled out all the authentication features/gates if the business picks up, as a starter the safe idea could have been to put it behind any openly available OAuth provider
Pangram and everything like it is useless. The results are random on known samples.
“ The attacker hadn’t broken into anything. They’d just noticed something I hadn’t: I had a verified email-sending domain attached to open, unverified signup, and that’s a useful primitive if you don’t care what you send.”
[0] https://xcancel.com/JohnHolbein1/status/2059648132250570975#...
(I'm less interested in false negatives; I have successfully produced those myself.)
was a dead giveaway in my mind when I read it.