Comment by esseph

6 hours ago

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.