Accessing Max Verstappen's passport and PII through FIA bugs

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Legal risk and ethics of security research

  • Multiple commenters note that probing systems without an explicit bug bounty or authorization is legally risky (CFAA in US, German cases under §202 StGB).
  • Some share experiences of being threatened with legal action for good‑faith reporting, often de‑escalated only when someone senior intervened.
  • Debate over the ethical “stopping point”: some argue you should report likely vulnerabilities without fully exploiting them; others say responsible validation sometimes requires going further.
  • Concern that harsh laws and prosecutions push researchers either to stay silent or act anonymously, while black‑hat attackers face fewer practical constraints.

Attitudes toward disclosure and company responses

  • Some companies allegedly try to retroactively label payouts as “bug bounties” to buy silence; others react quickly and fix issues (the FIA taking the site down same day is praised).
  • Strong sentiment that the public deserves to know when organizations mishandle security and PII, especially regulators or bodies with public trust.

Security failures and technical discussion

  • The FIA implementation is described as “wide open,” with basic authorization missing, mass‑assignment exposure, and unnecessary retention of sensitive documents on live servers.
  • Discussion that frameworks can help with certain classes of bugs but cannot fix fundamentally broken authorization logic; mass assignment issues can even be introduced by frameworks.
  • Commentary on password handling: skepticism about the hash quality, with side discussion of bcrypt vs argon2id/yescrypt, and jokes about weak “ROT” schemes.

Client-side security, data trust, and PII

  • Repeated reminders: never trust client‑side checks or user‑supplied data; examples of modifying form fields/JS to change options, subscription cadence, or even prices.
  • Some jurisdictions treat even trivial client‑side tampering as “hacking,” leading to arrests, which many see as overreach.
  • Debate over “post‑hoc finger pointing”: some emphasize practical tradeoffs, others insist that when handling others’ PII, strong security and data minimization are non‑negotiable.