Comment by mtlynch
18 hours ago
Good in terms of prompt communication and fix. Absurdly bad in terms of reward.
Earlier in the article, it mentions that Baseten is valued at $13B. They can't dig into their couch cushions to give a few thousand dollars to the researcher privately disclosing a bug that let an attacker escalate to admin in their GitHub org?
This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
> Absurdly bad in terms of reward
This is two companies working together. Most of the comments below are assuming this was an independent security researcher doing work on their own time. This was professionals doing work for their companies on both sides.
> This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
The reason they were looking for bugs was in the context of a B2B relationship, not as a someone independent on their nights and weekends.
If they give them any additional compensation it would probably be in some amount of free or discounted services, which is what they’d want anyway.
The main payment is all the viral advertising that this AI hacking tool is getting right now. Hard to put a price on that.
Literally paid in exposure.
Swag packages like these are a token of appreciation not a reward.
The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .
Most people who find a dropped wallet will return it without evaluating the market value of your compromised identity or the contents of the wallet .
Grateful owners may buy you a beer that doesn’t make them cheap , not everything is evaluated in purely money terms, and that is a good thing ?
> The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .
not always, especially if its just someone independent. iirc there was a guy here not too long ago who started dropping Windows 0days because Microsoft couldn't be assed to process his bug reports
That actually supports the point that people aren't acting under purely financial motivations. If the guy was purely following financial motivations, surely he would have chosen to sell the vulnerabilities to the shadier side of things. Instead, he dumped them publicly, burning their value while amplifying the "fuck you" factor to Microsoft.
Ignoring reports, or just fixing the vulnerability without acknowledging the work put in by a researcher, is rude and invites rudeness in return.
Microsoft runs a bug bounty program. NightmareEclipse (that’s the researcher’s handle) allegedly participated and Microsoft did not honor their part of the bug bounty program terms.
This is a completely different situation - a company evaluates the security of a prospective vendor prior to entering a business agreement.
> iirc there was a guy here not too long ago who started dropping Windows 0days because Microsoft couldn't be assed to process his bug reports
Did that ever actually happen? I remember him threatening to start dropping 0days and getting a lot of press coverage for it. When I tried to look it up I didn’t find anything at the time.
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Wallets usually belong to real people with lives. We can empathize with them. Companies are not people. And they also don't and can't empathize with you.
>Wallets usually belong to real people with lives.
So does data ? it belongs to real people.
I would imagine baseten's customers and eventually their end-users[1] were also grateful that their data was not compromised here and the disclosure was responsible.
[1] There is a pretty good chance you and I could be using services who are using baseten
"and can't empathize with you" - I don't really understand why such a perception of companies has been regurgitated and reinforced so much in US public, to the point where it's a blank excuse from ever expecting such a thing from a company. It's not true that it can't. The only reason to keep repeating that kind of worldview is to absolve companies behaving in shitty, toxic or downright evil ways.
The law doesn't say companies MUST choose the most profitable choice at every turn, and even explicitly allows for good treatment of customers, community, employees etc as a viable business strategy (even if it's sad that it must be justified in that way).
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Companies are 100% people. The fact that companies, their CEOs, and employees are not treated like people is exactly reason why humanity is in the shitshow show it is right now.
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> The follow up arguments will be that since billion dollar companies ultimately only care about their bottom line, so should we.
so it should be fought by giving them free work in the hopes that they'll finally feel guilty and then start paying proper bounties?
like to me that just seems funny, as if they'd change anything if we'd keep rewarding them for not doing the right thing
like, there's a reason regulation exists for all kinds of shit because otherwise companies would do all kinds of atrocities in hopes of cutting costs
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It's nice to wax poetic, but they should absolutely pay the researchers here.
Yeah companies need to quickly understand that having good actors try and hack you is a good thing - those hacks get reported and another door gets sealed shut for bad actors.
This is more true today than ever before as the bar for a successful attack has never been lower. We’ll see a resurgence of the script-kiddie, or shall I say, vibe-kiddie :-/
The researcher in this case was doing a security review for their company who was a potential customer. Sending potential customers more than a token amount of cash is usually prohibited by corporate ethics rules for obvious reasons.
That's incorrect. It's not only perfectly acceptable, but absolutely vital, to pay someone for their services (incl a customer) for assisting with an existential threat against the corporation.
Any counsel or HR who would draft a corporate ethics rule that wouldn't allow for a bug bounty to be paid out on a massive vulnerability, merely because the person was "a potential customer", should be immediately replaced.
if it were my company I'd not pay a dime if the researcher was going to make a big public blog post about a security issue in my infrastructure that I promised customers was secure.
I'm sure the cash value of the advertisement here is worth more than a bug bounty would pay.
of course not, all they can do is a lil "thx"
> This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
of course, these companies want you to sell vulns to brokers and other orgs. they don't care about bug reports.
otherwise they'd pay as much or even more, right?