Vulnerability researcher here. This vulnerability was patch-gapped before it was disclosed.
When the patch went out 9 days ago [1], many vulnerability researchers were able to look at it and identify the root cause within minutes. Exploits started going out over a week ago before it was publicly disclosed and the CVE was released. Good security orgs that can hire skilled vulnerability researchers started patching on December 6th/7th/8th. All the chaos started on December 9th when people started leaking the poc on twitter.
The same thing happens to google chrome when they release a patch for a security vulnerability. Very skilled researchers can produce a POC and exploit given the patch alone [2]
It's really hard for vulnerabilities as simple as this one to stay under wraps. When the patch went out 9 days ago [1], many vulnerability researchers were able to look at it and identify the root cause within minutes. Exploits started going out over a week ago before the CVE was released. Good security orgs that can hire skilled vulnerability researchers started patching on December 6th/7th/8th. All the chaos started on December 9th when people started leaking the poc on twitter.
The same thing happens to google chrome when they release a patch for a security vulnerability. Very skilled researchers can produce a POC and exploit given the patch alone [2]
The same thing happens even with embargoes like the one you describe in place.
For those of you who are unaware, Comex is one of the most respected security researchers of all time and has done extensive research into Chrome and won Pwn2Own multiple times. He is completely correct, keystone is just Chrome's auto updater. The technical content of this article is super thin. This shouldn't be on the top of hacker news.
This reminds me of Proxy Auto Configs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config). PAC files are Proxy configs that are programmed in JavaScript. To do this devices usually embed a JavaScript runtime in the operating system to parse proxy files. This introduces a lot more attack surface than a standard config file would and has resulted in remote code execution vulnerabilities in android and windows
It looks like it intentionally didn't have any protections in place. The edit page has the comment
<!-- Feel free to take advantage of the lack of CSRF protection -->
It also has <h1>What could possibly go wrong.</h1> go wrong in the default editor source.
Was it irresponsible? Yes zq should have put a warning for sure. Still a cool experiment. Twitch Plays Pokemon with bigger repercussions.