https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This one probably has the best summary:
$5,000 is actually pretty normal for a critical. I think the most I received for one bug was around $10,000, but this is the exception.
AI has also ruined the market. I'm a security consultant (where I make most of my money) and stopped bug bounty once AI slop reports made it impossible to actually get anything triaged in a timely manner.
Something else many don't know is that with all of the major platforms, customers can see the bugs before they are even triaged by the platform team. Many companies are now taking advantage of the long triage times and fixing the bugs before the researcher can get paid. It's then marked as a duplicate and the researcher gets nothing.
Isn’t that just a speedrun-encouragement for selling the exploit not to the one offering the product, but an attacker offering more (in this case, >$0 is not difficult to exceed) instead?
Zero-click iPhone exploits that affect the current OS and also previous ones are worth hundreds of thousands.
the unilaterally set awards by the affected corporation are far lower and based on the price of the researcher’s liability
You could view the bounty prices as market evidence that most of this is rightfully treated as nothingburgers. I.e. the alternative to paying $5000 to some random person for this class of vulnerability research is not risking a trillion dollar hack the next day - it's just risking shmaybe some kerfuffle down the line, followed by fixing it through normal triage process. The bounty program is as much marketing as security, and $5000 is probably about the right price for marginal effort into sustaining the "we are treating security seriously" message.
In a way, the very existence of those bug bounty programs in large companies is evidence they don't see a reason to treat vulnerabilities seriously enough to proactively find and fix them in-house.
If security vulnerabilities would be anywhere serious as most commenters on-line seem to think, companies would pay hundreds of thousands for serious vulnerabilities, just to save a day before they get hit by them - on top of spending millions in-house to try and stay ahead of the attackers.
But they don't. Because most exploits are inconsequential and/or aren't being exploited much.
3.85 billion is actually closer to a "penny" for Microsoft.
There should really be laws for protecting security researchers who produce 0 harm and divulge / share a vulnerability with a service provider. I'd rather the floor be getting no money AND not going to jail or being sued.
He wasn't a security researcher. He broke into a room and used equipment to steal information. It wasn't just 'tax funded papers'. Companies invested millions of dollars into some of this research.
We shouldn't support theft and he should have gotten some jail time/punishment for it.
"There should really be laws for protecting security researchers who produce 0 harm and divulge / share a vulnerability with a service provider. I'd rather the floor be getting no money AND not going to jail or being sued."
Too many 'security researchers' demand money or threaten to release the vulnerabilities.
I don't know anyone that got into trouble going through a legit bug bounty program.
It’s almost like most of you people have already forgotten your teenage years. And it shows. Doesn’t matter the decade or generation. A teenager , likely living with parents or grandparents, will always prioritize intangibles.
A mere 5 bands for full editorial control is quite literally peanuts for M$. It’s yet another case of abusing free labor, unfortunately.
If I have an income of $250k/yr and a pack of peanuts costs $2 or very roughly 0.001% of my annual income, the equivalent peanut money for ~$130 billion a year microsoft would be more like $2 million.