Six Months !?! If I'd left a vulnerability like that open for 6 hours there'd be hell to pay. Something that critical is call for hitting the big red off button.
Ah, see, if the CEO does something that hurts the company it's ok. In fact, they will pay him (or her) for making the mistake in the form of a golden parachute. It's only the rank and file employees that actually suffer consequences from failures.
Just because company failed to limit access does not mean it is public data. Just like stuff not being screwed or glued down doesn't mean you are free to take it.
The federal government outlaws "knowingly accessing a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access" to obtain information from any "protected computer" (which, in this context, means any computer involved in interstate commerce - which, in practice, has been ruled such that it certainly includes any Internet-connected server of a corporation).
Your defense would have to be that you were authorized to access the data, or that you did not know that you weren't authorized to access the data. Not merely that the data was easily accessible.
It’s not public data. Just because it is unintentionally publicly available does not make it public data, except in the strictest, most pedantic interpretation (that would never hold up in front of a judge).
I keep being amazed how most basic things are not checked. Cross-tenant isolation is one of the main things I check for... With other generic information leaks.
Sturgeon's Law is proved correct time and again. Most things are crap. Most people produce some crap in their lives. Some people only produce crap. Those people still need to eat but unfortunately some of them (somehow) find their way into tech and actually convince people to pay money for crap.
Especially with a low bar to entry like what is essentially AI-backed transcription-as-a-service, I'm not sure 90% is high enough. There will be 100 companies offering essentially the same thing and it's unfortunately the responsibility of the customer to find the one written by someone who doesn't have a parsnip where their brain should be.
However if you start current SOTA models out on a bad codebase they will happily write more bad code to fit in with the "conventions" of the existing code. Including authentication and isolation. If you start out your app on the wrong foot (for example because you lack the vocabulary to express what you need) you can end up with nicely polished turds
Asking the LLM for a review of the code would still have caught it
I love the never-ending "SOTA" treadmill used to defend anything and everything these LLM tools shit up. Doesn't matter what happens, it wasn't one of the "SOTA" models (which changes every 7 seconds) ergo it's irrelevant, how very convenient for the AI pushers!
Can someone give me exact time when SOTA stop being good? Is it a day, week or a month? As such can I consider anything older than that time period to automatically be crap?
Don't worry, I'm sure this was all an AI agent's fault, so no one to blame and all they need to do is update their code review prompts to not make mistakes.
This is bad. I run a company in this space (deepfake voice phishing), and one of the most common pushbacks we hear from buyers is: “Where are attackers going to get audio clips of our employees?” ... excluding senior leadership, which most companies already recognize as a risk.
PS: To demonstrate how this can be exploited with real time voice changers i.e. a voice phishing simulator .. we also built a free tool that shows this attack combined with someones voice ..
It's almost like people need knowledge and experience to work with tools securely. The problem with Firebase (I think) is that its marketing is "it's easy to use" and I'm confident most problems - like storing this info - is easy to figure out and finish, then move on to the next thing.
But this is lazy / "move fast" software engineering. They mention all of these certifications, I think they should be stripped of them for a year because of a failure to respond / act.
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Distributing it might count as copyright piracy, but merely downloading public data?
Your defense would have to be that you were authorized to access the data, or that you did not know that you weren't authorized to access the data. Not merely that the data was easily accessible.
Especially with a low bar to entry like what is essentially AI-backed transcription-as-a-service, I'm not sure 90% is high enough. There will be 100 companies offering essentially the same thing and it's unfortunately the responsibility of the customer to find the one written by someone who doesn't have a parsnip where their brain should be.
And even if, a later "is this ready for release" will probably surface such obvious issues.
I do not think LLMs are the problem here. Today, they are most likely more competent than whoever set this up.
Asking the LLM for a review of the code would still have caught it
That is not a very good basis to start complaining about AI producing insecure code.
If you still want to do it, at least check if it actually is the case with reasonably intelligent current models.
then kick the can for 6 months?
We might be able to check the meeting minutes and get the answer?
Another similar incident that happened recently was 4TB/40,000 contractors voice + government ID + selfie leaked .. https://oravys.com/blog/mercor-breach-2026
PS: To demonstrate how this can be exploited with real time voice changers i.e. a voice phishing simulator .. we also built a free tool that shows this attack combined with someones voice ..
https://www.callstrike.ai/voice-phishing-simulator (Voice Phishing Simulator)
https://www.callstrike.ai/deepfake-security-training (Deepfake Video Simulator)
It’s obviously a heavily restricted PoC, but it helps demonstrate the attack path in practice.
Leaked selfies? Do you mean ID photos?
Wasn't a dating app exposed this year with same negligence or firebase security?
But this is lazy / "move fast" software engineering. They mention all of these certifications, I think they should be stripped of them for a year because of a failure to respond / act.