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Comment by woofie11 | Hacker News Reader

The context you're missing is it doesn't matter. Next person to discover a similar vulnerability in Azure will have a choice:

1. Disclose to Microsoft for $40k

2. Disclose to an intelligence agency for several times that

3. Disclose to criminals for several times that, in turn

The incentives are now publicly known to be misaligned, and as a potential Azure customer, I have to contend with the simple reality that a significant number of vulnerabilities will be exploited rather than reported.

$40k doesn't even come close to covering engineer time here. This should be a $1M payout.

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Options 2 and 3 pose a moral and physical risk. Money isn't the only factor.

If companies have to outcompete criminals and intelligence agencies in the open market there will be no bug bounties, we'll just go back to the old way of doing things.

The reality is that if an organization is using a managed database and doesn't have service-provider vulnerabilities as part of their threat model, they are naive and arguably negligent.

Mid-range engineer at big tech makes $350k / year. I think having a vulnerability like this go to Microsoft instead of criminals is easily worth a few engineer-years. A $1M payout is just not unreasonable or even difficult for a $2.5T corporation.

My point isn't that $40K is enough or $1M is too much, it's that pinning public payouts to the grey/black market is unsustainable. This bug could easily be worth $10M in the right hands, so why stop at 7 figures?

You think Microsoft can't pay $10 million? Paying $40k means they don't give a shit about their customers.

The reason you pay so little is to not encourage ppl to even start looking.

Knowledge required to find stuff like that is very scarse. And you have to know where to look for.

Chances to find something really big are so small that its not worth it to look for them finnancially.

Thats why ppl don’t do that often. They do it if they have long cooperation history with given company because they are treated as an employee.

TL;DR is that you don’t want to encourage ppl to start looking. All software has bugs, so its only a matter of time until someone finds something.

Would you pay 100x as much for a service that is protected by that level of award?

1. Work at Microsoft. Make a bug. 2. Tell your "security researcher" buddy. 3. Split $10m in zcash.

Since you are already being a criminal, you could go all the way and sell it to a security agency, Zerodium or another criminal.

The company you work for, once they track the code back to you, will investigate you to make sure you did not make profit on it.

Thats why many doing that kind of stuff probably use a third party that keep money for a definite amount of time.

Well, my experience is that grey/black markets and crime pop up virtually everywhere where people can't afford to make an honest living which covers food and housing.

Once you reach a certain bar, people do the right thing.

$40k isn't enough to cover the cost of research+reporting at livable salaries, let along overhead, fake starts, etc.

1) Microsoft could afford $10M

2) I think people would be honest well short of $10M

3) The cost to customers, if this went public, would be far more than $10M.

You want people to be able to make an honest living on security research, or otherwise, the only people looking for vulnerabilities, aside from the independently wealthy hobbyists, will be crooks.

It does matter that they are ex-employees though. At some point you start to risk employees planting bugs themselves stealthily to claim the bounty later.

if you're only in it for the money i don't think white hat is your calling.

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