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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

This question comes of up frequently with these and it's premised on the hypothetical value of the bug on 'the black market'. The vast majority of such reported vulnerabilities have a 'black market' value of roughly zero, though, including this one. This doesn't say anything about the quality of the research, just that it's pretty hard to get monetary or other value out of most vulnerabilities.

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It’s quite a bit more nuanced than that. Businesses only want to pay because it costs less than the damage done to the brand and/or lawsuits from users/data controllers. They don’t want to pay more than that. Researchers need money and are able to sell the fruits of their research to whomever they want. Generally, good-natured people will especially see if the bounty is worth it. It’s clean money, so it has additional value vs. selling it on the black market.

So, as you can hopefully see, it is a balancing act between all parties.

No, I don't think that holds much explanatory power - the vast majority of vulns have not only zero black market value, they also carry effectively zero brand or legal liability risk. This is also the case for this vuln.

Generally, getting root on internal infrastructure is just a step away from doing whatever you want. Even if it is just waiting for someone to ssh in with -A set so they can steal your ash keys.

Yes that is exactly the sort of thing that has zero non-bounty dollar value and next to no legal or brand risk.

A good rule of thumb is that if an exploit doesn't drop pin-compatibly into a pre-existing business model that has repeatedly used similar exploits in the past, it's worth nothing in a "commoditized" vulnerability market --- the kind HN tends to think of in these stories ("Zerodium" being the most common example). You can theoretically find someone who will listen to your story and give you money, but at that point you aren't so much selling a vulnerability as helping plan a heist.

I could be wrong about this, but I've been loud about it around people who do a lot of this stuff and none of them have dunked on me in public. :)

While I'm not familiar with the black market, I refuse to believe that an arbitrarily modified pytorch binary release has zero value.

That’s fine but it isn’t much of an argument.

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