Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable

Fiverr (gig work/task platform, competitor to Upwork) uses a service called Cloudinary to process PDF/images in messaging, including work products from the worker to client.

Besides the PDF processing value add, Cloudinary effectively acts like S3 here, serving assets directly to the web client. Like S3, it has support for signed/expiring URLs. However, Fiverr opted to use public URLs, not signed ones, for sensitive client-worker communication.

Moreover, it seems like they may be serving public HTML somewhere that links to these files. As a result, hundreds are in Google search results, many containing PII.

Example query: site:fiverr-res.cloudinary.com form 1040

In fact, Fiverr actively buys Google Ads for keywords like "form 1234 filing" despite knowing that it does not adequately secure the resulting work product, causing the preparer to violate the GLBA/FTC Safeguards Rule.

Responsible Disclosure Note -- 40 days have passed since this was notified to the designated vulnerability email (security@fiverr.com). The security team did not reply. Therefore, this is being made public as it doesn't seem eligible for CVE/CERT processing as it is not really a code vulnerability, and I don't know anyone else who would care about it.

221 pontos | por morpheuskafka 5 horas atrás

21 comentários

  • gregsadetsky
    1 hora atrás
    I wrote to security@fiverr.com and they just replied:

    "You’re the second person to flag this issue to us

    Please note that our records show no contact with Fiverr security regarding this matter ~40 days ago unlike the poster claims. We are currently working to resolve the situation"

    [-]
    • morpheuskafka
      1 hora atrás
      I have uploaded the email here: https://gist.github.com/aidanbh/3da7cecb3e2496e5c5110b88f21b...

      (technically, I guess that doesn't prove anything other than it is in my Sent folder? it has a message ID but I guess only the purelymail admin could confirm that)

      In any event, this should never have required an outside reminder. The indexing issue may be something non obvious. But the core decision not to use signed/expiring URLs is nothing less than good old security by obscurity.

    • Loughla
      1 hora atrás
      So who has more incentive to lie, fiverr or OP?
      [-]
      • applfanboysbgon
        1 hora atrás
        Is this even a question? Obviously, the company that has publicly posted people's tax forms on the internet is very trustworthy and we should eagerly believe everything they say.

        I don't think it even comes down to "lying". It's possible that they genuinely believe they didn't receive contact, but given that they are verifiably completely and totally incompetent and have no right to be employed in their current role, they've earned exactly zero benefit of doubt.

        [-]
        • morpheuskafka
          56 minutos atrás
          @janozole -- that was my thought too, though less so that they wouldn't share a claim of not being notified at all with a third party, but more that those kind of things need to go through legal/comms/etc not whoever runs the security mailbox. if the person running the email box is not the CISO, surely they at least need the CISOs approval to say something beyond a thank you or followup questions? (and if they are the CISO, then they have bigger things to worry about then replying...)
        • janoelze
          1 hora atrás
          (weird to share any details about this incident to uninvolved parties via email anyway)
  • applfanboysbgon
    1 hora atrás
    Software development jobs are too accessible. Jobs with access to/control over millions of people's data should require some kind of genuine software engineering certification, and there should be business-cratering fines for something as egregious as completely ignoring security reports. It is ridiculous how we've completely normalised leaks like this on a weekly or almost-daily basis.
    [-]
    • Loughla
      1 hora atrás
      Teachers have to be licensed and keep up on licensing.

      Plumbers. Electricians. Lawyers. Doctors. Hell, I have to get a license to run my own business.

      Why shouldn't software come with a branch for licenses if you're working with sensitive data?

    • morpheuskafka
      1 hora atrás
      They may be part of it, but as a publicly traded company, there's got to be a at least a few people there with a fancy pedigree (not that that actually means they are good at their job or care). But if such a test existed, they presumably would have passed it.

      They also have an ISO 27001 certificate (they try to claim a bunch of AWSs certs by proxy on their security page, which is ironic as they say AWS stores most of their data while apparently all uploads are on this).

    • fnimick
      1 hora atrás
      At least I'm sure LLM tools deploying code to production won't result in this happening more frequently. "Make sure it's secure. Make no mistakes."
  • HeliumHydride
    1 hora atrás
    It seems that someone sent a DMCA complaint months ago relating to this: https://lumendatabase.org/notices/53130362
  • mtmail
    4 horas atrás
    You followed the correct reporting instructions.

    https://www.fiverr.com/.well-known/security.txt only has "Contact: security@fiverr.com" and in their help pages they say "Fiverr operates a Bug Bounty program in collaboration with BugCrowd. If you discover a vulnerability, please reach out to security@fiverr.com to receive information about how to participate in our program."

  • qingcharles
    2 horas atrás
    That's wild. Thousands of SSNs in there. Also a lot of Fiverr folks selling digital products and all their PDF courses are being returned for free in the search results.
  • wxw
    4 horas atrás
    Wow, surprised this isn't blowing up more. Leaking form 1040s is egregious, let alone getting them indexed by Google...
  • janoelze
    2 horas atrás
    really bad stuff in the results. very easy to find API tokens, penetration test reports, confidental PDFs, internal APIs. Fiverr needs to immediately block all static asset access until this is resolved. business continuity should not be a concern here.
    [-]
    • mpeg
      2 horas atrás
      lots of admin credentials too, which have probably never been changed
      [-]
      • janoelze
        1 hora atrás
        admin passwords to dating sites, that's the stuff people get blackmailed with
        [-]
        • qq66
          1 hora atrás
          How does someone's dating site password end up in Fiverr?
          [-]
          • janoelze
            1 hora atrás
            it's worse than you think – it's an admin password to the ~whole site~
  • tfsh
    1 hora atrás
    Hopefully this can be patched soon.

    Their robots file specifically has the code to disallow search engine crawling commented out - https://fiverr-res.cloudinary.com/robots.txt.

    ---

         See http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html for documentation on how to use the robots.txt file
     #
     # To ban all spiders from the entire site uncomment the next two lines:
     # User-Agent: \*
     # Disallow: /
  • johnmlussier
    2 horas atrás
    Probably not in scope but maybe https://bugcrowd.com/engagements/cloudinary will care?

    This is bad.

    [-]
    • morpheuskafka
      2 horas atrás
      They probably wouldn't act immediately as there's no way for them to enable signing without breaking their client's site. The only cleanup you could do without that would be having google pull that subdomain I guess?

      (Fiverr itself uses Bugcrowd but is private, having to first email their SOC as I did.)

  • psygn89
    1 hora atrás
    I guess they used Fiverr for security
  • impish9208
    2 horas atrás
    This is crazy! So many tax and other financial forms out in the open. But the most interesting file I’ve seen so far seems to be a book draft titled “HOOD NIGGA AFFIRMATIONS: A Collection of Affirming Anecdotes for Hood Niggas Everywhere”. I made it to page 27 out of 63.
    [-]
  • mraza007
    4 horas atrás
    Woah that's brutal all the important information is wild in public
  • sergiotapia
    1 hora atrás
    This is really bad, just straight up people's income, SSN and worse just right there in the search results on Brave Search even.
  • yieldcrv
    1 hora atrás
    this is a bad leak, appreciate the attempts at disclosure before this
  • smashah
    2 horas atrás
    They bought and.co and then dropped it. strange company
  • popalchemist
    3 horas atrás
    Burn it to the ground.
  • BoredPositron
    3 horas atrás
    Just by scrolling over it that's really rough.
  • iwontberude
    2 horas atrás
    Loooool what a mess
  • walletdrainer
    1 hora atrás
    > Moreover, it seems like they may be serving public HTML somewhere that links to these files. As a result, hundreds are in Google search results, many containing PII

    This is not how Google works.

    [-]
    • AndroTux
      1 hora atrás
      It kind of is, though. Google doesn't randomly try to visit every URL on the internet. It follows links. Therefore, for these files to be indexed by Google, they need to be linked to from somewhere.