Comment by duozerk
5 days ago
> That's pretty bad! I wonder what kind of bounty went to the researcher.
I'd be surprised if it's above 20K$.
Bug bounties rewards are usually criminally low; doubly so when you consider the efforts usually involved in not only finding serious vulns, but demonstrating a reliable way to exploit them.
Here is a comment that really helped me understand bug bounty payouts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43025038
Everyone should read this comment, it does a really eloquent job explaining the situation.
The fundamental thing to understand is this: The things you hear about that people make $500k for on the gray market and the things that you see people make $20k for in a bounty program are completely different deliverables, even if the root cause bug turns out to be the same.
Quoted gray market prices are generally for working exploit chains, which require increasingly complex and valuable mitigation bypasses which work in tandem with the initial access exploit; for example, for this exploit to be particularly useful, it needs a sandbox escape.
Developing a vulnerability into a full chain requires a huge amount of risk - not weird crimey bitcoin in a back alley risk like people in this thread seem to want to imagine, but simple time-value risk. While one party is spending hundreds of hours and burning several additional exploits in the course of making a reliable and difficult-to-detect chain out of this vulnerability, fifty people are changing their fuzzer settings and sending hundreds of bugs in for bounty payout. If they hit the same bug and win their $20k, the party gambling on the $200k full chain is back to square one.
Vulnerability research for bug bounty and full-chain exploit development are effectively different fields, with dramatically different research styles and economics. The fact that they intersect sometimes doesn't mean that it makes sense to compare pricing.
Why is it the USA doesn't have their own bug bounty program for non-DOD systems? Like, sure, they have a bounty for vulns in govt systems. But why not accept vulns for any system, and offer to pay more than anyone else? It would give them a competitive advantage (offensive & defensive) over every other nation. End one experimental weapons program (or whatever garbage DOD spends its obscene budget on) and suddenly we're not cyber-sucky anymore.
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Just go with XMR
This underestimates the adaptability of threat actors. Massive cryptocurrency thefts from individuals have created a market for a rather wide range of server-side bugs.
Got a Gmail ATO? Just run it against some of the leaked cryptocurrency exchange databases, automatically scan for wallet backups and earn hundreds of millions within minutes.
People are paying tens of thousands for “bugs” that allow them to confirm if an email address is registered on a platform.
Even trust isn’t much of a problem anymore, well-known escrow services are everywhere.
The bounty could be very high. Last year one bug’s reporter was rewarded $250k. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44861106
Maybe google is an exception (but then again, maybe that payout was part marketing to draw more researchers).
So is there anything that would actually satisfy crowd here?
Offer $25K and it is "How dare a trillion dollar company pay so little?"
Offer $250K and it is "Hmm. Exception! Must be marketing!"
What precisely is an acceptable number?
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I think a big part of "criminally low" is that you'll make much more money selling it on the black market than getting the bounty.
I read this often, and I guess it could be true, but those kinds of transaction would presumably go through DNM / forums like BF and the like. Which means crypto, and full anonymity. So either the buyer trusts the seller to deliver, or the seller trusts the buyer to pay. And once you reveal the particulars of a flaw, nothing prevents the buyer from running away (this actually also occurs regularly on legal, genuine bug bounty programs - they'll patch the problem discreetly after reading the report but never follow up, never mind paying; with little recourse for the researcher).
Even revealing enough details, but not everything, about the flaw to convince a potential buyer would be detrimental to the seller, as the level of details required to convince would likely massively simplify the work of the buyer should they decide to try and find the flaw themselves instead of buying. And I imagine much of those potential buyers would be state actors or organized criminal groups, both of which do have researchers in house.
The way this trust issue is (mostly) solved in drugs DNM is through the platform itself acting as a escrow agent; but I suspect such a thing would not work as well with selling vulnerabilities, because the volume is much lower, for one thing (preventing a high enough volume for reputation building); the financial amounts generally higher, for another.
The real money to be made as a criminal alternative, I think, would be to exploit the flaw yourself on real life targets. For example to drop ransomware payloads; these days ransomware groups even offer franchises - they'll take, say, 15% of the ransom cut and provide assistance with laundering/exploiting the target/etc; and claim your infection in the name of their group.
I don't think you know anything about how these industries work and should probably read some of the published books about them, like "This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends", instead of speculating in a way that will mislead people. Most purchasers of browser exploits are nation-state groups ("gray market") who are heavily incentivized not to screw the seller and would just wire some money directly, not black market sales.
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> Even revealing enough details, but not everything, about the flaw to convince a potential buyer would be detrimental to the seller, as the level of details required to convince would likely massively simplify the work of the buyer should they decide to try and find the flaw themselves instead of buying.
Is conning a seller really worth it for a potential buyer? Details will help an expert find the flaw, but it still takes lots of work, and there is the risk of not finding it (and the seller will be careful next time).
> And I imagine much of those potential buyers would be state actors or organized criminal groups, both of which do have researchers in house.
They also have the money to just buy an exploit.
> The real money to be made as a criminal alternative, I think, would be to exploit the flaw yourself on real life targets. For example to drop ransomware payloads; these days ransomware groups even offer franchises - they'll take, say, 15% of the ransom cut and provide assistance with laundering/exploiting the target/etc; and claim your infection in the name of their group.
I'd imagine the skills needed to get paid from ransomware victims without getting caught to be very different from the skills needed to find a vulnerability.
I am far from the halls of corporate decision making, but I really don't understand why bug bounties at trillion dollar companies are so low.
Because it's nice to get $10k legally + public credit than it is to get $100k while risking arrest + prison time, getting scammed, or selling your exploit to someone that uses it to ransom a children's hospital?
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> but demonstrating a reliable way to exploit them
Is this a requirement for most bug bounty programs? Particularly the “reliable” bit?
This depends on the program.