Last week the schedule for our weekly security column collided with the Independence Day holiday. The upside is that we get a two-for-one deal this week, as we’re covering two weeks worth of news, and there is a lot to cover!
[Petko Petrov], a security researcher in Bulgaria, was arrested last week for demonstrating an weakness he discovered in a local government website. In the demonstration video, he stated that he attempted to disclose the vulnerability to both the software vendor and the local government. When his warnings were ignored, he took to Facebook to inform the world of the problem.
From the video, it appears that a validation step was performed on the browser side, easily manipulated by the end user. Once such a flaw is discovered, it becomes trivial to automate the process of scraping data from the vulnerable site. The vulnerability found isn’t particularly interesting, though the amount of data exposed is rather worrying. The bigger story is that as of the latest reports, the local government still intends to prosecute [Petko] for downloading data as part of demonstrating the attack.