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Whistleblower payoffs in the US can be up to 30% of collected money https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower > The Commission is aut
by seibelj 7y ago
Whistleblower payoffs in the US can be up to 30% of collected money https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower
> The Commission is authorized by Congress to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to a Commission enforcement action in which over $1,000,000 in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.
If the government started paying off employees who report data violations, there would be a lot of retired engineers on Hacker News!
- HenryBemis 7y agoThat could create a conflict of interest though. Imagine I'm an engineer that can profit by adding some malware on a (e.g.) printer. Ka-ching! I add the malware, count til 10 (weeks), report to regulator, cash out, adios amigos!!! And then HP (for example) is left with the penalty. Not fair for the company. This is one of the reasons we need independent reviews & assessment. Conflict of interest, maker-checker matter in this line of work. A whistleblower is always a whistleblower, but one can open the gates and then cry wolf.
- netsharc 7y agoPresumably HP could sue the engineer for willful sabotage? Especially if that engineer whistle-blew the problem that the bug causes (on the code s/he wrote) instead of submitting a bugfix..
- theptip 7y agoI think the plan would be to add the malware in such a way as to not get caught/attributed, I.e. hack the build server, impersonate another user account, or similar.
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoThat scenario is about as sensible as a person committing a crime and attempting to collect the police reward for information by turning themselves in. (Depressingly, a bit of Googling shows that people have actually tried this. Needless to say, they did not get the reward.)