Comment by david_shaw
6 hours ago
Let's take a moment to talk about the monetary value of this vulnerability.
According to the Chrome release page (https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/09/stable-channel...), Google paid a researcher $1000 for ethically reporting this.
The CVE associated with it (CVE-2026-85046) is already being exploited in the wild. If we put our thinking caps on, how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment. But at the same time, if someone submits a critical issue like this, it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth. Why should a researcher be effectively penalized for responsibly telling a vendor instead of selling the bug to a "research firm" or three-letter agency?
It's one thing if you're an open source project maintainer just trying to put something out to the community. The math is a lot different if you're Google.
If the vulnerability is already being exploited in the wild --- as in, it's a vector people already know about and are tracking --- it's possibly not worth much at all. Vulnerability valuations depend heavily on the lifespan of the vulnerability; payments on black market are tranched (explicitly or less explicitly, as with "maintenance payments") based on whether they're patched.
Further: a vulnerability is probably not worth that much either, even if it's a hypercapable vulnerability, because the grey market buys full enablement kits, not vulnerability information. People making 6 figures on vulnerabilities are selling fully enabled full chain exploit systems, not just intelligence about a sandbox escape.
I was under the impression that the three letter agencies and contractors bought vulnerabilities?
That's really informative but maybe a little overly capitalist-brained.
We shouldn't look to the black market as cost discovery for these vulnerabilities, most non-criminal researchers are not putting up an ask order and letting the black market compete with Google.
> We shouldn't look to the black market as cost discovery for these vulnerabilities
We absolutely should. One of the points of bug bounties is to discourage people from selling to the black market.
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How much money is lost by consumers/businesses for every hour the vulnerability is exploited in the wild with no patch?
The value of the report is dependent on the scarcity of the knowledge. If anybody can report it, the bid goes down.
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That’s not how things are valued. That’s moreso how the absence of something is valued.
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[flagged]
Mate, it’s a style thing that depends on which style guide you’re following
AP recommends spaces around them, whereas Chicago doesn’t
besides if we’re critiquing incorrect following of English orthography
—Sentences should be capitalized
—The word “don’t” requires an apostrophe
—End sentences with a period
—That’s incorrect usage of an em-dash at the end there — but what does it matter anyways ;)
Books I've read would disagree. Are you the emdash police?
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they put spaces there so their AI generated text looks a bit more human, when in reality humans rarely use em dashes for casual comments or text. The only use for it prior to AI cuntwriting was in high brow literature, philosophy and wannabe high brow internet writing. But ai thinks that just how we talk
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While I agree 1000 is hilariously low for this, worth is hard to quantify. Do you pay what it could theoretically cost your company? the amount the top bidding bad actor would be willing to pay?
The discount Google is getting on bounties versus internal spend is easy to estimate:
While we lack the data to be sure, it is reasonable to estimate that they're getting a discount of 90% or better versus internal spend on this bounty payment, if one assumes that they do not have many sandbox RCEs left undiscovered. It's unclear whether that assumption holds, but with only a single researcher at an assumed $0.5mil/year (all-inclusive after pay, stock, and benefits) is enough to support the plausibility of that 90% figure, before accounting at market rates for their internal use of the house AIs.
So, the most likely case is that they're greedy and miserly, and hope we don't do the math. However I recognize that there are judgment calls to be made here. Either their internal spending finds hundreds of RCEs per year, or they're significantly discounting bounty payments versus their actual worth, or they're negligent in budgeting for RCE discovery at all, or they assign zero value to the security of the Chromium platform underpinning Edge, Electron, et al. All of these are bad in different ways; one hopes a competent tech reporter actually pursues this line of questioning with them!
> or they're negligent in budgeting for RCE discovery at all, or they assign zero value to the security of the Chromium platform underpinning Edge, Electron, et al
I generally agree, but a 3rd explanation is they figure that too generous a bounty will flood them with reports of minor issues making major ones harder to see (and costing time and money to verify that could be spent looking for security issues).
You let the market decide. Google could purchase the bugs on the same market blackhats do.
Google directly competes with the grey market for vulnerabilities. They are competitive in a bunch of different directions:
* They pay for vulnerabilities without reliable exploits (more for vulnerabilities that are demonstrably reliable).
* They don't require you to actually build a reliable exploit chain.
* They pay up front, not in tranches.
* They work with essentially all comers, unlike the grey market, where you're generally subcontracting to sell your first few.
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we really do not want to engineer a system in which using bugs to make money is considered economically legitimate activity. It is still crime. The main reason to report bugs and get the bounties for doing so is still because it makes the world safer and healthier. The money is there to make is to incentivize the work of finding and reporting them -- not to outbid the bad actors.
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Well, someone did decide to tell google about this in exchange for a thousand dollars (albeit unclear how much the money was the motivator). Doesn't that mean the market did decide in google's favour?
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Blackhat markets will always be able to pay better. Selling to Google though you aren't chancing jail time.
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They would be broke quick.
In the past I would have thought this would incentivize finding bugs that might never be found. However it is now clear that all bugs that can be found will be found. So this makes a ton of sense.
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ideally, an auction and the vendor or a government can bid against malicious actors (which can also be a government). hard to set up though.
What kind of auction would you like to run?
Remember that you can sell the same vulnerability to multiple people: it's software you can copy.
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it seems unlikely google's lawyers would go for this
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you're taking someone's word it's being exploited. It says right at the top of the report
> allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code *inside the sandbox*
A bug in V8 leads to code execution in Chrome's web page process. It does not lead to execution in general. For that you need other exploits that escape the web page process. Those are not detailed here. This CVE is not a big deal. You're responding the poster's title, not the actual CVE
Makes you wonder how many hacks wouldn't have occurred if security researchers (and vulnerability disclosure) was actually rewarded proportional to the possible/potential damage said vulnerability may have otherwise caused.
It's insulting how poorly incentivised white hats are, just look at how much North Korea is raking in with their cyber shenanigans - current estimates put it at around $6.75 billion to date (over the past 10 years or so).
If this would have included a full RCE chain with Sandbox escape Google would have paid significantly more.
Having just a Sandbox RCE is neat, I've got some on my laptop currently, but it's just a piece of the puzzle.
There are plenty of people out there who find vulnerabilities and sell them to the highest bidder. Anyone is welcome to do it, including the researchers and hackers reporting them responsibly. There's no need to try and make a convoluted ethical justification. "I did this bad thing because you didn't pay me enough not to" doesn't work past the 6th grade.
Interesting question, and how much should a user pay Google to fix the vulnerability? I suppose the smallest unit of currency less than the amount of effort they'd have to put in to mitigate it. A fully market economy of bug fixing here is an interesting idea, certainly, but if I'm being honest I actually don't want to pay Google a thousand dollars to fix security issues. In the limit, what would happen is that I end up with the competitor browser Elgoog Emorhc which fixes security issues for free, and pays very little for them, which is the status quo.
In the world where security issues are paid for entirely at market rate, it would also be very important to not use browsers by poor groups because they would be unable to pay for security reports on the market and consequently the browsers would be less secure.
Interesting idea, for sure, but I don't think it lands in a place I want to go since I neither desire stochastic payments nor desire that all browsers should be from large corporations.
> How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
On average, probably not that much. What's the amortized cost of all testing, static analysis, and audit / code review, per "prevented potential bug"?
You've been on HN for 16 years and still comment the lowest brow possible comment on security vulnerability threads that the bounty isn't big enough. How many times do we need to have a top comment crying about the same thing? If you think its too little, sell the exploits you find for more.
It sounds insultingly low, yeah. I'm trying to imagine why they would pay so little. The only two reasons I can think of are either (a) they were already aware of it and fixing it, and therefore the report didn't really change much, or (b) it requires an unusual configuration or otherwise rare opportunity to that makes it impractical to exploit most users. Really curious to see what the issue was whenever it gets made public.
(c) there are so many undiscovered vulnerabilities that it doesn't make sense for them to offer a decent payout
> But at the same time, if someone submits a critical issue like this, it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth.
I'd point out that part of the reason the grey and black market pays so well is because it is that type of market. You have to pay people extra to look past their morals and a risk premium against potential reputational and legal consequences.
That said, the gap is probably not just that.
It seems like by definition it is.
Someone could sell it on the black market, sell it to Google, or just move on with their life and not sell it.
I don't know what this is worth on the black market, maybe I'd be scammed by even trying to sell it. Maybe I don't want to be a bad person. These are all things that go into the prices
If you really explore the concept of worth, Google "engineers" are grossly overpaid, otherwise they would have found this themselves already.
How many PMs are making more than bug bounties to fetch coffee and bagels?
Their priorities are all out of order.
this is why again, researchers should just honestly sell these to vuln brokers instead of donating them to trillion dollar companies for nothing.
nothing will change until big tech can no longer rip off security researchers
They're not going to stop underpaying security researchers just because security researchers decide to sell them to vuln brokers. Advocating for this is reckless.
But my “Google paid me” on my resume!
The problem is they are being flooded with both fake AND real disclosures. Imagine if they tried to pay out $250,000 or more per bug? Would the cost be worth it? Maybe, but shareholders may not be pleased... Unless they viewed it as insurance against it being more financially sound for the finder to sell the exploit on the gray or black market instead...
Pre-flood, they didn’t pay more did they?
> viewed it as insurance
Of course. Beyond the ethics, the social obligation, sleeping well at night by compensating hardworking people fairly.
“We can’t pay more or we’d have to hire more human reviewers” should never be a massive company’s line of thinking.
They should just multiply a base rate against the severity level. Say the base rate is ranged so low-severity stuff is $500-1K base but high-severity stuff is $10K base. That would net a researcher ~$88K for this specific bug (8.8 severity).
That would create a perverse incentive to inflate the severity levels even more than they already are
CVE severity is a terrible way to do this. If you follow the cybersecurity space you should know why.
it's such a drop in the bucket, it wouldn't make any difference
"because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment" Maybe they should now, not like anyone else cares about ethics anyway.
Imagine the consideration for the Trump admin, should we pay this guy a million bucks for this attack that gets us into the command system of Iran, or would that be unethical. Of course they don't consider that at this time.
People are free to pool their money and offer higher bounties.
> Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.
Why not? Capitalism requires they maximize their value. These profitable companies lay bare at the altar, so they should understand the requirements of their god.
Seems like it was worth $1000 to the researcher in question.
> Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.
I mean, why not?
The CVE associated with it (CVE-2026-85046) is already being exploited in the wild. If we put our thinking caps on, how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
in the darkweb, due to crypto, a lot. there is where the $ is, whether it's stealing crypto directly or phishing developers.
>researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.
Hell no, the same level bugs at Google should be enthusiastically paid way more than from an undercapitalized startup, who actually needs the help more so. Should be orders of magnitude difference in relation to scale.
>it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth.
Honest fair-dealing should come into play at least but there are some players who have struck it so rich they can now take enough pride to pay an additional premium just because they can, and their good human nature almost compels them ethically to do way more than the minimum.
Just apparently not at Google.
If a company has achieved financial success to a degree that they are no longer worried about complete failure for the foreseeable future, then it's only a matter of generosity vs Scrooge-like behavior.
What's missing from their overall business acumen if they can't even afford to project an image of generosity yet?
If they're not actively making a serious effort to pay the maximum they can well afford for bugs that are truly serious, there is a technical term for that. Chickenshit.
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