PayPal needs to seriously reevaluate how they want to approach the vulnerabilities. Why have a bounty program if you are going to act hostile towards the white hat community or even ignore their reports?
Note that here, Paypal paid a substantial bounty a year ago.
“We reported this in February 2019 to PayPal via HackerOne,” they say. “After an initial rejection and several discussions, PayPal paid a bug bounty of $4,400.” The pair have not heard from PayPal, they say, since April 2019. But this week “tried and could still use the virtual credit card for online payments.” That means, they told me, “the bug has not been fixed.”
To reiterate the OP, what is the point of a bug bounty program that ignores or fails to address reported issues?
> The two stories are unrelated
They are related in the sense that both stories show a failure to respond to reported issues.
> Note that here, Paypal paid a substantial bounty a year ago.
They paid but didn’t fix the issue? This is not taking account security serious at all.
At best, PayPal has a critical flaw in their bug bounty program.
This seems curiously confident given that just about every single one of your many comments on the other story was inaccurate or a misinterpretation.
So you don’t think that sending a bug bounty reward a year ago to a security researcher who exposed a flaw, that is still being exploited to take money from people, is a critical flaw in the program?
Do I think your 'motivated googling' approach to analyzing either story is likely to produce worthwhile insight? Not really. We've already seen it be remarkably inaccurate.
Great! You’re in agreement!
$4400 is not a substantial bounty for a bug of this severity, compared to the value on the black market. Like, the article even cites that attackers have extracted over $1000 from some individuals, multiply by thousands of users.
The black market value of this exploit is certainly into the hundreds of thousands.
Vulnerabilities are worth money in markets when they fit into pre-existing business/operational models. That's why clientside RCE in popular clients is valuable: multiple competing buyers have whole operational frameworks where new RCEs are drop-in compatible. Nobody speculatively builds new business models around the prospect of a random serverside vulnerability.
Maybe a vulnerability like this has value --- we don't know what it is, or how much interaction is required, or how quickly it could have been killed --- if it directly produces cash every time it's applied. But that's still a maybe for a serverside vulnerability with a half-life of epsilon.
Meanwhile: $4400 is a strong bounty for a serverside logic vulnerability. Serious vulnerabilities like stored XSS have bounty values in the hundreds of dollars despite the fact that people on HN seem to think they're worth 6 figures on some hypothetical black market.
I have no opinion about how Paypal handled this vulnerability after paying up for it; I'm exclusively interested in how this story intersects with yesterday's Paypal thread, which was a shitshow.
This is something that is routinely done already with credit card fraud. This is how thieves "cash out" the cards they steal with skimmers at gas pumps and stores.
The angle here is that they no longer need to steal your digits with a skimmer, they can just use your contactless payment wallet, because Paypal didn't lock them down properly. Or so the researchers allege (they don't give the exact details of the vuln for obvious reasons).
You're also only responding to a fraction of my argument. Even for clientside RCE, alternate market buyers don't pay full freight in a lump sum: they tranche payments because they know vendors will eventually kill the vulnerability and nobody is sure how long that will take. Here, you have a vulnerability where you'd more or less have to get paid royalties from direct fraud, because, again, Paypal can presumably kill the bug instantly.
If you have more specific details on the vulnerability that will enable you to make a clearer case for how this could drop into a system of repeated profitable attacks, provide them. I'm interested in hearing them.
Otherwise, my default response to people saying "this bounty is too cheap because the black market would pay 10x for it" is "yeah, sure, and for logout CSRFs too".