> the last time I interacted with MSRC regarding reporting a VSCode bug, it was a horrible experience where they silently fixed the bug
Classic MSRC. It has figured out that researchers will report for free regardless. Why change?
Classic MSRC. It has figured out that researchers will report for free regardless. Why change?
I don’t know the specifics of this case, but I’ve managed bug bounty programs in the past through Bountysource and HackerOne. One thing that occasionally happens is that a report makes its way to the development team before the security team has fully assessed it, in this case MSRC.
At that point, a developer may decide to quietly fix the issue. Sometimes that’s driven by a concern, rational or not, that being associated with a security bug could reflect poorly on them or affect future promotion opportunities. The result is that by the time the security team attempts to reproduce the report, the vulnerability is already gone.
From MSRC’s perspective, all they see is that the provided reproduction steps no longer work. They have no visibility into the internal history of the bug or whether someone already patched it. As a result, the report gets closed as invalid even though the original finding may have been legitimate.
This is laziness, security absolutely could verify these steps.
However, if you have 1000s of reports a day, many of them vague with the person hoping it's close enough to a real issue to get paid, it makes sense to me personally that one needs prioritize active issues over tracking down when other issues were fixed.
Aww man, if only they owned some sort of platform for tracking those, powered by some sort of program. Doesn't even have to be a smart problem, it can be, succintly, shortly, stupid. If only.
I'm catching up on the infosec twitter side but it seems like it was even worse. A lot of people have the same story as me in 2023 of "they silently patch the bug and don't even credit you" which really stinks.
I hope you get credit where credit is due in future endeavors.