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  • Hacker News
  • Hah. This is nothing.

    I know a blackstone company, who were a client of mine before they underwent a hostile takeover (blackstone fired everybody).

    They claim to be ISO 27001 certified. They are not. They never removed me from their ISMS, and I can see it has not been touched in three years now.

    Wait, it gets worse.

    My root credentials still work, both for the app, and for AWS. Nobody has logged into AWS in years (hey, we built a reliable system).

    I have unfettered access to highly sensitive (in some cases literally classified) commercial data for the likes of Apple, Siemens, Philips, BAE Systems, Raytheon, and more.

    Wait, it gets worse.

    They did something to the API endpoint. You can now bypass authentication entirely and anyone has access to this data.

    Anyway. Bunch of shysters. Incompetent shysters.

    by madaxe_again
  • If what you say is true a report to ISO themselves will strip their certifications away and make them toxic to other businesses.
    by lightedman
  • I'm glad you did this, but be careful man. Dudes have been prosecuted (right? wtf?) for way less:

    https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1046124278/missouri-newspaper...

    Hoping this doesn't happen to you!

    by lacoolj
  • No charges were filed in that case. It was just an out-of-control, weak, stupid, and corrupt governor - Mike Parsons - abusing his power to try to cover up his ignorance and his administration’s incompetence.

    If you don’t stand up to weak bullies like that, you end up with people like Trump and Putin in charge.

    by antonvs
  • What a trashfire of a company. Where are the legal penalties for such reckless behavior?
    by josefritzishere
  • Beam Living

    https://www.beamliving.com/

    by toomuchtodo
  • yep
    by bearsyankees
  • My biggest take away from this is not really anything about the specific security vulnerability, but rather that real estate industry people will buy any SaaS product without research or any due diligence.

    I have personally seen real estate people buy some trendy new app based intercom or entry phone system and jam it onto the front of their building and try to require that all of the residents use it...

    by walrus01
  • What would you expect them to do? They're in real estate. They're not coders. Sure, they could hire a company to evaluate choices and let them know, but they're so not coders how would they even know that's something that can be done? Also, how much time would that add to getting off of a spreadsheet that gets emailed to people each time it's updated?

    We seem to lose the concept that people outside of tech have not idea about anything other than whatever they do. Just because you (the royal you) knows the ins/outs of security software does not mean the other 98% of the population does. Yet you're blaming them for buying a tool to do the thing they need help. Blame the devs for being idiots. Don't blame the users.

    by dylan604
  • I work for a company building real estate adjacent software and have worked on connections to all the major property management systems and large (and small) proptech companies. I can tell you that at least 90% of them have some of the worst security practices you've ever seen. Many of the largest property management systems allow a third-party vendor to export your Social Security number and date of birth, and most property managers I've seen don't bat an eye at giving up as much information as their vendor requests (which they usually don't need).

    Real estate is very much a closed of group of more traditional business and has not begun to understand their responsibility to keep this data safe.

    Edit for more detail: To tack onto this, it's very much the case we're all familiar with where management doesn't care about something being built correctly, they just want it built. Add on top that the management usually has no technical background. Also add that very few engineers that are passionate about writing good software want to stick around at these companies. It's a real nightmare industry.

    There are some companies that will give you faith, but they're the occasional large property manager that's been scared shitless about a security based lawsuit (fine by me) or a proptech that's "disrupting" the industry that will be acquired by one of the big dogs in 18 months and slowly eroded away.

    by jjice
  • Beam Living is just the property management company that runs buildings Blackstone owns in New York City. There are thousands of companies like this all over the country and if you poke hard at any of them you will find stuff like this.

    There's nothing wrong with pitching stories this way, but for context, if you look at this researcher's archive, they're all basically "I found a vulnerability in some big company's thingy". The news hook here is literally just "I found a GraphQL bug". This is not Alex Schapiro's most interesting front-page story (by which I mean: they've posted some genuinely interesting stuff before).

    by tptacek
  • I'm glad HN can be counted on to defend Blackstone's good name.
    by jordanb
  • There absolutely is everything wrong with implicating a company that has no knowledge of and no responsibility for the breach.
    by consensus1
  • Yeah like why is Blackstone named and not the actual company? Clickbait.
    by phkahler
  • Yeah I hear you but I think this community loves writeups like these -- I personally have learned a TON about how to be an effective security researcher by reading technical writeups others have posted here. Agreed this vuln wasn't a complicated one by any means but I feel like this is the forum for sharing this stuff
    by bearsyankees
  • Also, as far as I know, no residents were ever alerted that their data was exposed so this also is a bit of a public disclosure angle
    by bearsyankees
  • Well, the other notable fact about this story is it's Blackstone, which has a record of giving managers a lot of leeway to do anything to juice the numbers.

    Two examples:

    1) Hiring 14 year old slaughterhouse workers (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pssi-hired-same-child-t...)

    2) Gamifying of one its genealogy websites that tracked cemetery markers, which resulted in people "claiming" victims of mass shootings for points (https://dna-explained.com/2022/06/02/find-a-grave-owned-by-a...)

    ETA

    People have asked about the second example. In a nutshell, Ancestry purchased Find-A-Grave in 2013, and Blackstone acquired Ancestry in 2020.

    Originally, Find a Grave was basically used by amateur genealogists to check the names and dates on gravestones across North America. So, if you want to verify Grandma Smith's burial location and other gravestone data three states away, you could search the database for free. Volunteers could submit photos and other data.

    Blackstone brought in a Facebook executive to run its genealogy business, and gamified Find A Grave for engagement/revenue purposes (Find A Grave is top of funnel for Ancestry subscriptions and also is heavily blanketed in ad networks.)

    Gamification led to some very ugly situations, and as I recall they barely backed down over this. Per Roberta Estes, an experienced genealogist cited above:

    The problem is that finding your loved one’s memorial, often with incorrect information, created by a stranger is unexpectedly jarring, at best. Especially to discover that your family member was only a trophy harvest whose memorial was created hours after they died. Then, having to ask (sometimes beg an unresponsive person) for the transfer of their memorial to you, only to have the creator’s name forever associated with the memorial adds insult to injury. ...

    Who in their right mind would think that entering those massacred children into Find a Grave immediately was acceptable by any criteria? Any standards of decency? And why would Find a Grave tolerate this for even a minute? Death is traumatic for family members under the “best” of circumstances and it only goes downhill from there.

    by ilamont