Re: [Full-disclosure] We're now paying up to $20, 000 for web vulns in our services

[Jim Harrison <Jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Perhaps I'm more of a pessimist (actually just a disgruntled optimist), but 
unless the rewards increase _substantually_, I can't see a $$-oriented black 
hat switching sides.  The potential "reward" for silently cracking into the 
Google (or any cloud or hosting provider, for that matter) user information 
(especially PII) has been estimated to be well above $20K.  The user list alone 
can possibly net that much, depending on who's buying and the list contents.  
Any _actual_ black hat that sells a really serious discovery to Google rather 
than marketing his discovery (and the data it exposes) on the black market is 
either under LEA scrutiny or is just a bit confused about where the real money 
is to be made.

..but maybe that's just me...

Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob McConnell [mailto:rvm@xxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2012 05:45
To: Michal Zalewski; Charles Morris
Cc: Jim Harrison; dailydave; websecurity@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; full-disclosure; 
bugtraq
Subject: RE: [Full-disclosure] We're now paying up to $20, 000 for web vulns in 
our services

> From: Michal Zalewski
> 
> > A you-only-get-it-when-successful 20,000$ budget from Google is 
> > insulting, considering the perhaps massive time investment from the 
> > researcher. [...] and yet they only pay a nice researcher 20 grand? 
> > You can't even live on that. Researchers aren't just kids with no 
> > responsibilities, they have mortgages and families
> 
> People who want to make a living helping to improve Google security 
> are welcome to apply for a job :-) We have a remarkably large and 
> interesting security team.
> 
> The program simply serves to complement that (and some other, 
> contract-driven efforts), and it works for quite a few people who see 
> it as a way to do something useful on the side, and get compensated 
> for it, too.
> 
> Now, I have done a fair amount of vulnerability research in my life, I 
> do have a family and a mortgage - and I still wouldn't see $20k as an 
> insult; but I know that this is subjective. In that spirit, you are at 
> liberty to determine whether to participate, and how much time to 
> invest into the pursuit :-)

Another point that seems to be overlooked in these discussions is that this 
bounty adds a new vector into the decision tree for the black hat. EvilBob now 
has to decide if that vulnerability he just found is worth more for his usual 
nefarious uses than the cash reward. In some cases, this might result in 
discoveries being reported for the reward instead of being used to attack the 
servers, converting the black hat over to white. I suspect the likelihood of 
this outcome increases exponentially with the size of the reward.

Bob McConnell


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