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Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

There is a big difference between discovering a vulnerability that allows you to forge tokens and immediately reporting it versus dumping terabytes of data on the darknet for sale.

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Unfortunately, door 1 is maybe $200 bounty and weeks or months of back and forth (if the corp doesn't have a clear bounty program) whereas door 2 has infinite upside. Honestly, it might make sense for a gov group to run a standardized bounty program for exploits with notable financial / privacy impact.

Giving corps even more excuse not to run proper bug bounties,

or care even less about shipping secure code?

Pass.

I don't know. I think you could perhaps align incentives such that any bounty claimed via the government program is competitive, public, and companies are ranked by the number and severity of bounties. Then the company would have an incentive to run a bounty program where they had a chance of controlling the narrative a bit.

There are two entities that constantly and consistently stomp all over human rights and sovereignty - governments and corporations. It also seems that most people are comfortable with asking them to increase the amount of control they have over our collective affairs.

It's quite the thing.

The solution is to have fines in place for insecurities and award them to discoverers.

What a wonderful idea. Im sure our nobel politicians will ignore their donors this time and craft legislation that puts large companies at constant threat of more fines. This could never be weaponized against small businesses that pose competition to the bigger fish.

This is an awesome idea. The next time a glibc CVE comes out every company in the world pays a fine, if they are impacted or not! Hey - you could even file 1000s of frivolous CVEs (which is already common) you know would affect your competition! (which is how that would pan out)

It is a shame that ideas never progress any farther than super basic principles before they are implemented so that totally predicable outcomes that cynical people on internet forums mention become inevitable.

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