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by bitbasher 24 days ago
I can’t help but feel Microsoft will regret this.

Guy finds zero days and gets no compensation. Instead gets banned.

Guy sells zero days elsewhere.

4 comments

But the story is supposedly about him posting the zero-day exploits, not selling them. It’s in the title.

He also got banned from Gitlab, which isn’t related to Microsoft at all.

Ever considered these aren't the full set of exploits the researcher discovered? Or that he can find more since he found these? If I found a bunch, I'd certainly withhold a few as insurance.
He's claimed that he has more as well. He seems to have a personal vendetta against Microsoft going by his blog, said nothing will be released in June but will in July: https://deadeclipse666.blogspot.com/2026/05/july-14th.html
Sure, but GitHub and Gitlab aren’t the only two ways to share code on the Internet. The conspiracy theories about two unrelated companies shutting down his git accounts to prevent him from releasing these supposed exploits are reaching pretty deep into conspiracy theory nonsense. The conspiracy theories can’t even agree if he was banned for posting them or because he hadn’t posted them but might post them.
time to post on IPFS
Sadly, IPFS is compromised[0].

0. https://specs.ipfs.tech/ipips/ipip-0383/

What does this mean and compromised in which sense?
I can see a situation where Microsoft contacted federal law enforcement to strongarm both GitLab and GitHub. But I believe all megacorps are one giant government conspiracy so consider the source.
At this point, the government is a megacorp conspiracy.
Is Gitlab also part of this? This is disappointing but unsurprising :(
I'm not sure if this is an unintentional mistake. Gitlab did not perform a ban. Github performed the ban. Github is fully-owned by Microsoft.
Yes they did: https://gitlab.com/nightmare-eclipse

That git account was posted on their blogspot...

Awful.

I understand Microsoft's being petty, but why would GitLab do this?

Lawyers?
Not one or the other but both. He's banned on GitLab as well.
Well, after they didn't pay him for previous bugs. Not an excuse but certainly a reason.
Are you sure?
Not to mention all the other people who find 0-days. Reputation matters a lot.
Yep, and its a really small world out there.

If researchers stop believing MS will treat them fairly it's bad news for the entire security industry.

Well. Its a bad news for society as whole.

Security industry going to be okay - someone will always pay for 0-days. If vendors wont pay its just gonna be US agencies, Israel resellers, China or Russia.

If you don't feed your army, you will soon feed someone's else's.

It's had bad news only for Windows buerocrats. Good orgs don't use Windows.
I have now worked for/with a significant percentage of the fortune 500. All used Windows in some capacity.

Is this just your way of saying that only tiny, weird, companies are "good"?

It's saying that those with Windows could be 100x more effective and secure. Wasting billions of money and a lot of time
These days corporate security treats these workstations like a dummy terminal. No secrets live on the workstation. You have to re-auth with sso constantly with biometrics and are basically editing data that is in a cloud. So the risk to a corp is minimal where even in the worst case they are insured.

Zero days like this are being disclosed regularly so the idea of securing a windows workstation is tantalizing but you'll never feel satiated trying to drink that water so don't even try.

So yea there's plenty of windows users but we're certainly not hosting anything important on those boxes and would frankly be aghast at the suggestion.

Not to mention all the startups being founded right now. Sure, github's still the default, and maybe you can still monetize stars or something, but it's also a clown show from an availability, feature roadmap and company policy perspective.

Is it really fiscally responsible to tie your company's future to that?

I wonder if anyone tracks metrics for this stuff. Percentage of stuff with a repo there is probably still high, but what's happening with stuff like github actions, and are devs directly pushing to github, or are they just mirroring an internal / other provider's git repo to it?

> Guy sells zero days elsewhere.

No problem. The CIA will give it's high level officers millions of dollars in gold bars simply for the asking. I'm sure purchasing exploits doesn't even require a purchase order.

Why would they regret it? According to the person who found them, they put those vulnerabilities there for a reason.