> researchers should be selling them to the highest bidder
But what about all of the innocent people who would be harmed by such a callous approach? I'm glad some researchers have a conscience.
But what about all of the innocent people who would be harmed by such a callous approach? I'm glad some researchers have a conscience.
They should then think again about their choice of using teams. Why should Microsoft rake in money from a shabby product while volunteers have to fix their shit?
Assigning a ridiculously low score to significantly lower the bounty as a billion dollar company is disgusting.
Try saying that to a student who is using Teams on a school-issued laptop, by no choice of their own.
I'm not in any way defending how Microsoft handled this. Frankly, I'm ashamed of my former employer (though I worked in a completely different division). But your outrage toward the company should not extend to its unwitting users.
And thinking these huge metrics get changed by selling black hat exploits to what? Teach Microsoft a lesson? While harming an already vulnerable population (not just children are obligated to use Teams). As if the long term goal of educating "unwitting" users is advanced at all by blackhat behaviour.
Deschooling is done on discord
Let's see how Ring goes over the next few years... ;)
What percentage of Teams users do you think have a choice in their use of Teams?
I work at an university and I've been forced to install that crap on my home computer because I need to teach from home. And so do all the professors in around half the universities I know in my country.
In Australia, the emp is generally responsible for providing any necessary tools or equipment needed to do the job (contractors are another matter though)
Anyway, those of us who have research projects (as is my case) typically do have computers provided by the university at home, because research has strange schedules and working from home has always been a need (meeting with colleagues in different timezones, waiting for experiments to complete at night, rushing for deadlines, etc.).
But... it's not really practical to make room for two different desktop computers for my own use in an already spaced-starved flat, or to work in a laptop for many hours when I could do so in a desktop. So in practice, my home computer and my work computer are one and the same. And it's like that here for most, if not all, people I know.
We are a Latin country and also tend to live in small flats, maybe in other places it's different. I can imagine that if I had one of those American McMansions, it would make sense to have a home office with a sober, black work computer, a good camera setup and a green screen, and then a gaming room with a flashy gaming computer and huge speakers (near the billiards and darts room, probably :)). But that's not really how things work about here. Here, separation of home and work computers at home is almost exclusive of jobs with high security restrictions. Most people in normal jobs just don't do it because it's not practical.
Necessity is the mother of invention, I have no doubt that the opportunities created by blowing away poorly-behaved incumbents will cause a healthy collections of startups who will be operating within the required framework.
Personally I would prefer just having all new vulnerabilities immediately disclosed once found. No selling, but letting people decide for themselves if they want to continue to use a product after someone has found a vulnerability. I also think the incentives this creates would mean that Microsoft and similar shops would put more effort into testing their own software because they would no longer have the safety net of a grace period when someone finds a problem.