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Comment by bakztfutur3 | Hacker News Reader

No, it's because Apple's 'product security' team that investigates and pays out bug bounties is horribly mismanaged and ineffective. It was recently moved from the SWE program office to SEAR (security engineering & arch), and the manager was recently shown the door and went to AirBNB. The team members are mostly new college grads (ICT2's and 3's) who wouldn't pass a coding interview elsewhere in the company, and mostly function as bug triagers. They spend more time going to conferences and hanging out with hackers, than in front of a computer screen working. Their portal of 'open investigations' shows a graph that only goes up (aka they only get more swamped with emails and don't even try to catch up).

Shaming Ivan, the head of SEAR, on Twitter is how people who should get paid bounties, but aren't, make progress.

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I have no idea about how well the bounty program at Apple is managed, so, without affirming this, I acknowledge this is another plausible explanation: it's just an understaffed team that needs to get its act together.

The only crusade I'm on is against the idea that companies ruthlessly avoid paying bounties, which is, on information and belief, flatly false, like, the opposite of the truth. I think it's valuable for people to get an intuition for that.

Thanks for this!

Honestly, Apple is a 3.5 trillion dollar company. If the bug bounty program is understaffed then it's an intentional choice and they should fix it. And I say that as someone who's generally sympathetic to Apple.

Sure. My comment isn't really about Apple specifically so much as bounty program misconceptions generally.

I think suspicion of bug bounties even from organizations who would clearly benefit the nost from doing them right are well founded and you are over simplifying the situation.

Every organization includes a mess of situations where the overall best interest of the organization no longer comes through. Groups and individuals don't want to admit mistakes both personal and in wider senses and have alliances, competitions, team and organizational loyalty that twists their behavior.

A lot of organizations know they would benefit from having a proper whistle blower program and then proceed to crucify the first person who uses it.

Bug bounty programs aren't whistleblower programs.

AP is saying they can suffer from the same corporate politics.

That doesn't make sense, because bounty programs can't punish vulnerability researchers other than not awarding bounties, and whistleblower programs can punish whistleblowers. I got what that comment was trying to say, but, no.

It becomes corporate politics when 'blame' is assigned to the team responsible for the bug.

The preceding comment, I could follow. This one I cannot. But I think we're doing the same thing that's happening all over this thread, and trying to axiomatically derive how these programs work. I'm not doing that; I (like a lot of people) have direct knowledge of them. It's not much of a secret.

Huh? Whistleblower programs exist to defend them and fail to combat the problem, one that directly punishes would be like a bounty program that actually crafts the legal threats to security researchers.

That is being done too. Teenagers showing vulnerabilities in school systems have been prosecuted in Sweden... Needless to say, they didn't get much help with looking for holes after that so who knows how many security holes they still have.

> the idea that companies ruthlessly avoid paying bounties, which is, on information and belief, flatly false

Eh, it's likely usually true, but I've worked for a company which was attracted to the bounty program idea mainly for the optics and very much did push back on/was very reluctant to pay out on bounties.

And when I say "for the optics" I mean not only for the company being able to boast about having a bounty program but also the executive in question having something for his quarterly report. Having it not be too expensive was definitely part of the deal.

Needless to say this was a terrible company with terrible leadership, but it's a data point...

Ok but not a company as reputable as Apple, yes?

Apple historically used to have a deservedly good reputation for this. I was quite shocked at this story.

> not a company as reputable as Apple, yes?

Definitely not, in fact rather the opposite. I was just sharing the anecdote as a counter to the otherwise fairly blanket claims being made upstream.

> Apple historically used to have a deservedly good reputation for this.

Are they? Apple only started their bug bounty program (with monetary rewards) merely 5 years ago, 12 years after first iOS release and well after everyone else. They are not very transparent about bugs and payouts (which is understandable) so I wonder where this good reputation comes from?

(if you count their invitation-only program then it started in 2016, 8 years ago)

That's the same thing.

Obviously no.

Getting paid to fuck off at conferences and hang out with hackers on the company dime instead of staring at a screen in a cubicle all day sounds pretty awesome. Do I detect some jealousy or resentment that you haven't mastered the art of the corporate grift?

This is like every software security team of every form in the whole industry. Sometimes it's real, sometimes it's not, but it's evergreen problem.

Similar problem when if you're an innocent software engineer who introduces a bug, the security people will find it, make up a fancy website and logo for it, go around giving conference talks about it, get bounties (or not), give each other prizes, post on Mastodon about it from their accounts with cool hacker nicknames, presumably go have Vegas orgies, etc. Nobody's doing that for you.

I think they could use a little more ritualized shaming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_mechanism

Only Linus is brave enough to do this.

that's the thing though: security teams composed of grizzled talent absolutely benefit from going to conferences. they bring back what they've learned and leverage their new connections to bring more value to the company. so now you've got this industry-wide norm that the security guys are kind of out of pocket and spend a bunch of time at conferences, but they know their shit and protect the infra so it's all good. if it worked at the last X companies $CISO worked for so they're going to be hesitant to drop the hammer on the netsec team networking.

practice of the art of the corporate grift does take a toll on one's soul. Usually only pyscho/sociapath can do master this and do it for a long time without any emotional/mental consequences.

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