I bypassed AWS API Gateway auth with a trailing slash. Got $12K bounty
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A security researcher discovered a vulnerability in a fintech's mobile API that allowed unauthorized access to account data. By exploiting a flaw in the AWS HTTP API's path matching, the researcher was able to bypass authentication checks and retrieve sensitive information. The issue was reported and promptly fixed, resulting in a $12,000 bounty for the researcher.
- ▪The API returned different responses based on the presence of a trailing slash in the URL.
- ▪The researcher was able to access account data and initiate transfers without valid authentication.
- ▪The fintech company fixed the vulnerability by switching to a stricter API and adding user validation.
3 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 7 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Blogspot |
| Canonical URL | https://theguptalog.blogspot.com/2026/04/i-bypassed-aws-api-gateway-auth-with.html |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 11:18:36 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T11:37:32.397Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T11:37:32.397Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | WCoo1HI5akJG · 3 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I was poking at a fintech’s mobile API and noticed something that made no sense. GET /v1/accounts returned 401. GET /v1/accounts/ returned 200 with full account data. One character. Completely different security posture.What I was looking atThe API ran on AWS HTTP API — the newer, cheaper alternative to REST API. Lambda authorizer checked a JWT against Cognito, returned an IAM policy. Standard.Routes in OpenAPI:YAML/v1/accounts: get: x-amazon-apigateway-integration: uri: arn:aws:apigateway:... /v1/accounts/{accountId}: get: x-amazon-apigateway-integration: uri: arn:aws:apigateway:...The authorizer ran on every request.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Blogspot.
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