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Man, Microsoft just keeps footgunning this one.
Every new exploit, they clearly have a meeting and convince themselves "that's gotta be the last of it, right?"
So the next day-after-patch-tuesday rolls around and lo and behold, this guy drops some more nukes on their reputation as far as their most important customer demographic are concerned (corporate IT)
Given this genuinely does seem to stem from Microsoft mishandling this guy, why the fuck do they keep escalating
Puts a lot of evidence towards his claims that Microsoft was behaving badly from the outset and the reason why he started doing this. They keep escalating. Its a war they started.
you know, since this little saga began I've had this tiny voice in my head hoping this one vindictive dude is, eventually, directly responsible for Microsoft going out of business/doing severe restructuring or downsizing as a consequence of businesses losing faith in the company's products. Lots of people already raise an eyebrow at Windows 11's issues, things like "all our shit is fundamentally insecure because microslop left a backdoor in [insert critical thing here], and has been for [weeks/months/years/???]" tend to have an adverse effect on sales, especially to risk-averse business customers. It's not impossible to imagine that continued "holy fuck what 0day exploit just dropped?" incidents, on the level of YellowKey, happening every month, could result in businesses deciding to drop their enterprise licensing of MS products; and that's going to hurt. That's where a big chunk, if not the biggest chunk iirc, of their revenue comes from. It's unlikely, it's a longshot, but I'm allowed to have hope.
I'm especially now wondering, if YellowKey was the teaser -- you know, just casually revealing a backdoor in BitLocker, like nbd -- what the actual fuck are they going to drop in July? If that's the appetizer, how juicy's the entree gonna be?
I think as long as nothing actually happens, other companies wont care. No one is capable of thinking about the future anymore, there is only next quartal and short term profits.
It might actually be needed for something big to go down first, like those 0day exploits actually get exploited and some client company or few loses a lot of money because of it. Considering how unsecure windows is, i'm a bit perplexed how nothing hasn't happened already.
Some of the other 0days this guy released are already being actively exploited in the wild, but no reports of big losses as a result of them yet. Having said that, the entire point of BitLocker was that it was full disk encryption that you didn't have to think too much about; and now I bet every corporate IT department out there is looking at it with suspicion. If this guy can keep delivering on "things that keep sysadmins awake at night", like "oh god every hard drive we've had stolen in the last few years can be fully decrypted now", eventually a lot of them will decide it is less harrowing and less work to move their entire stack away from Microsoft than it is to live with them.
They'd better not be overselling this bomb they're gonna drop in July. I'm already moved over to Linux fully now, to quote photonicinduction: I want flames. I don't just want to see it all over the tech news, I'm hoping he screws with them hard enough the story makes it to actual TV news channels.
Very little seems to be beyond the incredulity of MS meetings, remember they had a meeting where someone suggested the OS take a screenshot every ten seconds of whatever the user was doing and upload it to MS servers and rather than everyone laughing they agreed to move it into development.
rather than everyone laughing
You misspelled "firing the authoritarian nutjob for cause," which would've been the bare minimum of reasonable reactions.
“Hey, let’s piss off the security expert who’s really good at finding flaws in our products. There’s literally no downside.”
"Oh, the one who just published two exploits on our product, after we fucked them over during the responsible disclosure process? Great idea! What are the chances they'll find another one, right?
He's done more than two. This was his second round of releases. He was also the one that found the vulnerability in Windows Defender.
If the guy exposing the exploits is the be believed, they notified MS (or attempted to) and were ignored and then actively rebuffed. Then MS deleted the account (and the proof that this person actually reported these vulnerabilities/bugs).
Even if this person is lying I'm more likely to believe MS is the bad guy here. It seems like bullying to me. That and an attempt to mask the problems at the company because they have been getting a lot of bad press and are having trouble with the entirety of windows 11 which they forced on people and they keep breaking. The adoption rate of windows 11 being so bad also lends credence to what this person is claiming.
Microsoft has always been an evil company, but wow they are trying their hardest to reach Gates level of shit
Microsoft closed the case after the reporter refused to submit a video of the exploit
They don't have any actual fucking security experts there, so they require video proof that ape will understand.
Posting zero day exploits on github is a shit move. But Microsoft should be happy that this guy posted it on github rather than selling it on the black market.
Banning his guthub account won't make zero day vulnerabilities go away ffs.
I feel that companies like Microsoft have forgotten that bug bounties and ethical reporting are the compromise where they agree to pay a fair amount for the bugs and are given time to fix them and the security researcher forgoes the 10x price they could get on the black market.
Given the rise in mercenary hacking/spyware corporations, the bug researchers could probably get way more money through those alternate, and still legal, channels.
So I hear.
Responsible disclosure is a kindness; it is not required--especially if/when the vendor doesn't act in good faith.
MS shouldn't be able to silence researchers, but that's what the industry gets by voluntarily clustering around a single, proprietary service.
I don't think either party should be compelled to take (or reverse) any action.
Exactly. Thank you Microsoft do more of this so we end up in a federated world.
What even is the headline
That was my thought, what a absolute mess of a 'sentence'.
Eclipse implies that Microsoft ignored or refused their zero-day reports and/or did not pay out bounties as requested, somehow causing financial harm in the process.
“Somehow?”
Were the bounties not earned? Because simply not paying as a promised for services rendered is a very clear financial harm.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512
Okay,
So let me get this straight, when I actively asked you to communicate with me, you refused, humiliated me and made sure to insult me in front of people.
You defame me in public with your CVE-2026-45585 advisory even though you literally deleted the Microsoft account I used to report bugs to you with and I got zero pennies from doing so and I still happily did like an idiot.
Now you take the courtesy to flag my github account and wipe it out of the public, just like that ? You are proving to everyone that you actively escalating this conflict but I'm done begging you.
I might sound like crazy idiot who is whinning around but I have proof for every single word I said, I just can't release it yet. Why ? Microsoft still has chains in my hands, it's been like this for years and I just can't stay silent anymore. I hope I can release the documents soon.
Mark this date July 14th, I will make sure your bones are shattered that day. Nothing will be released this June (or maybe I will release smtg, depending on circumstances).
Also,
CVE-2026-45498 is UnDefend
CVE-2026-41091 is RedSun
New GitLab account,
https://gitlab.com/nightmare-eclipse
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bBMIAPsEczivsL71pbJizJHHlNNOf9guPAFFshJhhkwrDrwZ5wD/Vz6Z+d6vSvhQ
uVrEh4lPM84Q8+J56RLa50Zp46QLkAY=
=8wON
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https://deadeclipse666.blogspot.com/
Their account on GitLab is already blocked https://gitlab.com/nightmare-eclipse
Lmao. Is there anywhere they can go that wouldn't immediately block them?
And this is why if you're going to post something like this, you host your own git. Or use something like codeberg.
The dichotomy here is you can't be famous hosting exploits on smaller forges. Gotta be on the big platforms where you can be starred and forked for social media cred to make news stories to impress your friends. IIRC I think HeartBleed (maybe ShellShock?) was the tip of this popularity iceberg...
Does anyone care about stars?
Openclaw is the most starred repo in years (i wonder why) and is incredibly niche.
Stars are kind of a scam.
I do loosely use stars to gauge how popular a library/framework is before investing a lot of time in it, however, I do also use other metrics like PR count, issues, etc
Microsoft has been mum on any details about these matters, so it's hard to tell if the situation is about an uncooperative researcher who doesn't follow standard disclosure rules or a company being difficult about security reports. Regardless, the move to ban Eclipse's GitHub account makes for poor optics, as it is being heavily criticized, and ultimately achieves nothing for security, since the code is out there anyway.
Classic Streisand effect. Just two years ago Satya Nadella publicly announced they're prioritizing security above all else, but now have nothing to say about these exploits and are trying to silence the researcher? Viewing from the sidelines, it did seem a bit reckless how Eclipse was dropping these as zero days, but Microsoft's actions speak louder than words and they probably didn't pay for the bounties.
He also intentionally did it the day after patch Tuesday. July 14th is also Patch Tuesday. This is about retribution for him. How you view that is going to depend on your world view. I doubt any of us feel bad for Microsoft though XD
I'm surprised admins found a window large enough when github wasn't down to ban the researcher.
Didn't Google also recently used their stupid AI to find exploits in FFMPEG and then blackmailed them to fix it before deadline or they will release them to the public? If banning a dev for such "act" is right, then banning the company should also be right. Ban all of them.
Is this the bitlocker backdoor? That's not an exploit / zeroday
Thats making a backdoor be known.
Well the thing is it’s now been zero days since they had to write a new backdoor.
I wonder if the dude happened to find an internally documented backdoor intended for use by government actors? Or most likely they just don’t wanna deal with it and the perceived fastest way to deal with it is to try and bury it. Both could be true, but I’m just speculating.
Their april 15th blog post explicitly calls it a backdoor and mentions it was very well hidden. I'm interested to see what comes of this
HACK THE PLANET's windows
Uniformed other than a few snippets from the blog but the researcher doesn't seem to be in a good place mentally. Understandable if what they claim is true, making them unreliable if it isn't.
Not victim blaming, but things aren't automatically true because they are anti Ms.
If she's going for maximum damage, I am surprised this person doesn't just announce when she's found a big exploit, and then just sell it to up to 10 people, and then announce in very vague terms what the exploits are. (Like, "just sold exploit for windows defender" or "just sold way to hack into bitlocker").
It seems like the vagueness of such things would make corporations more worried about being hacked and Microsoft could only guess as to what specific code was hacked, costing them greater resources.
Yes, it would be illegal, and therefore I hope she doesn't do that and recommend against it. But I am just surprised, given the level of anger, that she has been approaching things in a way that is so easy to patch.
Is her approach more damaging the way she's actually doing it?
The saga has drawn speculation from other experts, like William Dormann from Tharros, who said that "MSRC used to be quite excellent to work with. But to save money, Microsoft fired the skilled people, leaving flowchart followers. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft closed the case after the reporter refused to submit a video of the exploit, since that's apparently an MSRC requirement now."
. . . In this day and age, when AI-powered security research has arguably made the standard 90-day disclosure-to-patch window completely obsolete, and both time-until-exploit and unused exploits are both nearing zero, Microsoft and other software players would do well to adjust their policies.
That's such an insane aside. 90-day disclosure-to-patch. Craziness.
On the other hand, this is exactly the way microsoft has been for - easily - 30 years. Like, 1996 microsoft could be slotted into today and literally nothing would change. Other than Nadella would probably be on a bunch of coke.
I'm no expert. Is this an issue where MS is refusing to pay bounties to the researcher for finding the bugs, and MS follows up by deleting the researcher's git hub? Am I missing anything? If I understand the basics, this is how you turn a white hat into a black hat. Good job microslop.
So the researcher has posted on their blog over the past few months some rants about Microsoft "destroying their life" and vowing to continue to post zero days in retaliation, and has been posting proof of concept code for these zero days to their GitHub.
From their rants (there's a couple of fresh ones including indication that tomorrow will be "one of the hardest days of their life" and that they'll post a big zero day on July 14th) it sounds like Microsoft deleted their account, revoked their access to the responsible disclosure portal and they've had some back and forth discussions in private that they're now making more public
Normally what happens is researchers report vulnerabilities via Microsoft's purpose-built bug bounty portal, and Microsoft can patch these vulnerabilities before they can be actively exploited, and researchers can pocket enough income to make a living entirely off of bug bounties. Obviously this all broke down in the case of this particular researcher so here we are
His blog posts share his side of the story, but Microsoft has not made any comments about what happened.
From March 26:
I never wanted to reopen a blog and a new github account to drop code...
But someone violated our agreement and left me homeless with nothing. They knew this will happen and they still stabbed me in the back anyways, this is their decision not mine.
Then on April 15:
Normally, I would go through the process of begging them to fix a bug but to summarize, I was told personally by them that they will ruin my life and they did and I'm not sure if I was the only who had this horride experience or few people did but I think most would just eat it and cut their losses but for me, they took away everything. They mopped the floor with me and pulled every childish game they could. It was soo bad at some point I was wondering if I was dealing with a massive corporation or someone who is just having fun seeing me suffer but it seems to be a collective decision.
And one other thing, they do everything but support the research community, I won't disclose details but they sabotage people a lot. I mean just look at the past, Microsoft is the only major company who had a track of multiple vulnerabilities being publicly disclosed just because the researchers were soo upset by how MSRC treated them.
Unfortunately, the folks who have the capacity to stop those disclosures, not only don't care but also seems to push harder for worst exploits to be released, I didn't want to be evil but they are actively poking me to start releasing RCEs which I will be doing at some point...
I will personally make sure that it gets funnier every single time Microsoft releases a patch.
There was a comment on the first post that I feel like is pretty on point, though a bit arm chair psychologist:
You’re a smart guy. Maybe a savant. Just wondering if you’re BiPolar (like me) and see a different reality than what is real. Been there.
friendly reminder there is a github replacement for opensource made by framasoft I think
Microslop C-Suite boomers really are dumb af
