Deterrance not only works at the individual level, anyone reading these news reports about an innocent person being wrongly prosecuted for doing the right thing, is being trained to not do the right thing next time and just do nothing instead (because that's safer)

Can confirm, not arrested but threatened with litigation/employer contacted for responsible disclosure of unsanitized user input allowing arbitrary access to protected data of presumably any user. Just a url query param value flipped from true to false. Incrementing int user id too, so enumeration is trivial and the response payload was json so no need to do anything.

It is amazing what a casual observer with a background in web dev will see if they just open devtools. It has instilled a deep aversion in me to give any service any of my data that I care about protecting.

But such a thing should not be prosecutable in the first place. Opening an unlocked door isn't breaking and entering. If you walk inside and steal something, that's a different thing. But if you just close the door and alert the owner that their door is unlocked, what sane person would consider that a crime?

Zeabur is shutting down: what happens next - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50198025 - October 2026

- On October 14, 2026 (UTC), an external attacker gained unauthorized access to Zeabur's internal systems and some customer services. We began our emergency response as soon as we detected the unusual activity. We have confirmed that this incident affected a broader scope than the incident in late August...Having another security incident in such a short time has let down the people who trusted us. Protecting your services and data is our responsibility, and we have fallen short.

The end of the road – OSGrid shutting down due to attack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060854 - October 2026

7 Companies Forced to Shut Down After a Data Breach - https://n2ws.com/blog/5-companies-shut-down-data-breaches - March 4th, 2025

(if others have more examples, I am collecting them, please drop them in a reply)

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As someone on the development side who just cares a lot about security, I've already witnessed the strict safety bite in the wrong direction too. IT staff are predictably terrified of the blast radius of these tools, so they're inclined to lock down internal enterprise agent subscription permissions so tightly that the tool is not only neutered but also incapable of doing pre-product release, staging testing or even responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities to adjacent teams at the speed at which threat actors will be able to move once it's in production. That's pretty bad. It's not like we don't wonder about the implications of architectural decisions we're making as we do them. We just often lack the bandwidth or resources to fully explore them. And there's a huge difference between "Let's see if I can DDoS this service" and "I wonder if that token is single use or not". If you're going to be tying your system to theirs, it seems like it's a good idea to question the latter and report that to them if it's not prior to shipping it. Forcing the engineer to do that manually helps no one good. I've always thought zero-trust was a little broken in this way, but now it feels really shattered.