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Comment by kozikow | Hacker News Reader

> A $1.3 billion revenue company being too tight to pay this after all, even on their 2nd chance, is so short-sighted it's absurd.

I'll give an "another side" perspective. My company was much smaller. Out of 10+ "I found a vulnerability" emails I got last year, all were something like mass-produced emails generated based on an automated vulnerability scanning tool.

Investigating all of those for "is it really an issue" is more work than it seems. For many companies looking to improve security, there are higher ROI things to do than investigating all of those emails.

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https://www.sqlite.org/cves.html provides an interesting perspective. While they thankfully already have a pretty low surface area from overall design/purpose/etc, You can see a decent number of vulns reported that are either 'not their fault' (i.e. wrappers/consumers) or are close enough to the other side of the airtight hatchway (oh, you had access to the database file to modify it in a malicious way, and modified it in a malicious way)[0]

[0] - https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/53de8864ba114bf6

We also had this problem in my previous company a few years ago, a 20-people company, but somehow we attracted much more attention.

In one specific instance, we had 20 emails in a single month about a specific Wordpress PHP endpoint that had a vulnerability, in a separate market site in another domain. The thing is, it had already been replaced by our Wordpress contractor as part of the default install, but it was returning 200.

But being a static page didn't stop the people running scanners from asking us from money even after they were informed of the above.

The solution? Delete it altogether to return 404.

Keep it as 200, then any reports you get about it can be added to a block list.

That's a much better idea than what we did. A honey pot for bug bounties!

We have a policy to never acknowledge unsolicited emails like that unless they follow the simple instructions set-out in our /.well-known/security.txt file (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security.txt) - honestly all they have to do is put “I put a banana in my fridge” as the message subject (or use PGP/GPG/SMIME) and it’ll be instantly prioritised.

The logic being that any actual security-researcher with even minimal levels of competency will know to check the security.txt file and can follow basic instructions; while if any of our actual (paying) users find a security issue then they’ll go through our internal ticket site and not public e-mail anyway - so all that’s left are low-effort vuln-scanner reports - and it’s always the same non-issues like clickjacking (but only when using IE9 for some reason, even though it’s 2024 now…) or people who think their browser’s Web Inspector is a “hacking tool” that allows anyone to edit any data in our system…

And FWIW, I’ve never received a genuine security issue report with an admission of kitchen refrigeration of fruit in the 18 months we’ve had a security.txt file - it’s almost as-if qualified competent professionals don’t operate like an embarrassingly pathetic shakedown.

I saw a great presentation from Finn.no on their bug bounty program. They had had great success, despite the amount of work it took. Much more so than the three different security companies they hired each year to find vulnerabilities.

They also had a security.txt file and had received several emails through that, but all of it was spam. Ironically they had received more real security vulnerabilities through people contacting them on LinkedIn than through their security.txt file.

Your milage may vary, but it didn’t seem like the security.txt file was read by the people one would hope would read it.

I understand, this is exactly why I noted "even on their 2nd chance". The initial lack of payout/meaningful response was incompetency by not understanding the severity of the vuln. Fine, happens.

But after the PoC that showed the severity in a way that anyone could understand, they still didn't pay. That's the issue. The whole investigation was done for them.

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