4 ms·

The context you're missing here is the company/research-team that found this are ex-MS employees who started a company (Wiz.io) to help other companies secure t

The context you're missing here is the company/research-team that found this are ex-MS employees who started a company (Wiz.io) to help other companies secure their cloud hosting/environments. This is some of the most pure-gold viral content marketing they can dream of, they don't care about the $40k at all, its just to acknowledge this is non-trivial.

doliveira 5y ago
That sounds like paying artists with "exposure".
- ufmace 5y ago
  There is kind of a 2-sided argument here: 1. Small time cheap skate business owners sometimes try to cheat professional artists by "paying with exposure", when they have no meaningful audience or influence and therefore no meaningful exposure to give. 2. Sources that do genuinely have very large audiences and influence can infact give an artist so much exposure that it's worth far more than any reasonable direct payment This situation seems a lot more like 2 than 1. The company is in the business of helping companies secure their cloud environments, and these articles going around the tech press are being read by hundreds of thousands of people who are generally more interested in cloud security than a random person. They could spend many times the amounts discussed here on advertising and still not get their name in front of that many of the right people in a good context.
  - doliveira 5y ago
    Big or small company, I doubt they can pay the employees' salary with "exposure". They might have pratically infinite VC money for now, but that's an orthogonal discussion, just as "exposure" and being fairly compensated are. edit: and what about it had been a smaller company or individual researcher who wouldn't be able to gain as much from this publicity? Are you saying that Microsoft would have awarded them $ 500k? Because that's not the message sent with this reward. And frankly, even this discussion is kind of off-the-point because I doubt that's what they took into account when defining the money quantity.
scrollaway 5y ago
Uh, yeah, maybe, I'm not sure how much this changes things to be honest. I fully agree with grandparent this is $1MM reward territory. (Edit: sibling put it really elegantly, this is pay-with-exposure justification) PR campaign or not, you don't spit on those kinds of rewards. And it's a bad look on MS to award 40k on one of the worst vulnerabilities to ever hit a cloud provider...
woofie11 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jcims 5y ago
  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.
  - woofie11 5y ago
    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.
    - jcims 5y ago
      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?
      - throwaway739 5y ago
        You think Microsoft can't pay $10 million? Paying $40k means they don't give a shit about their customers.

doliveira 5y ago

That sounds like paying artists with "exposure".

ufmace 5y ago
There is kind of a 2-sided argument here: 1. Small time cheap skate business owners sometimes try to cheat professional artists by "paying with exposure", when they have no meaningful audience or influence and therefore no meaningful exposure to give. 2. Sources that do genuinely have very large audiences and influence can infact give an artist so much exposure that it's worth far more than any reasonable direct payment This situation seems a lot more like 2 than 1. The company is in the business of helping companies secure their cloud environments, and these articles going around the tech press are being read by hundreds of thousands of people who are generally more interested in cloud security than a random person. They could spend many times the amounts discussed here on advertising and still not get their name in front of that many of the right people in a good context.
- doliveira 5y ago
  Big or small company, I doubt they can pay the employees' salary with "exposure". They might have pratically infinite VC money for now, but that's an orthogonal discussion, just as "exposure" and being fairly compensated are. edit: and what about it had been a smaller company or individual researcher who wouldn't be able to gain as much from this publicity? Are you saying that Microsoft would have awarded them $ 500k? Because that's not the message sent with this reward. And frankly, even this discussion is kind of off-the-point because I doubt that's what they took into account when defining the money quantity.

scrollaway 5y ago

Uh, yeah, maybe, I'm not sure how much this changes things to be honest. I fully agree with grandparent this is $1MM reward territory. (Edit: sibling put it really elegantly, this is pay-with-exposure justification) PR campaign or not, you don't spit on those kinds of rewards. And it's a bad look on MS to award 40k on one of the worst vulnerabilities to ever hit a cloud provider...

woofie11 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jcims 5y ago
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.
- woofie11 5y ago
  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.
  - jcims 5y ago
    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?
    - throwaway739 5y ago
      You think Microsoft can't pay $10 million? Paying $40k means they don't give a shit about their customers.