This kid just blamed Paypal for one of our country's many idiotic federal laws.
This choice should be considered a career limiting decision by any hiring manager.
Are you saying that you're holding a 17 year old student in Germany responsible for not understanding US labor laws?
You make it sound like if you hacked into Paypal from Germany you'd be completely immune to American law on the matter because you're not in the US.
That's simply not true.
Still very poorly handled. Should've gone something like:
1. "Hey, that's awesome that you found that, thanks!"
2. "For very good reasons (a), (b) and (c) we can't actually pay you, that really sucks :("
3. "But hey we like your style, so how about we fly you over for an internship when you've finished school / investigate if Germany has different rules / look at scholorship options and a great reference / [one of a million other things you could do to help a kid out"
Hopefully not forever. When I was young and stupid and the net was a much simpler place I casually fully disclosed the problem with posting your Cisco configs with "encrypted" passwords to Usenet:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.dcom.sys.cisco/WjuKAOQL...
I would not do something like this today, especially not in such a full-of-myself douchey manner.
Sadly a lot of postings to the internet are basically "forever" at this point and combined with the insistence of so many companies that real names be used, we're going to have generations of younger folks who say or do something stupid (because they are young and stupid) that they can never get rid of. And that's unfortunate.
I completely agree. I also think that this kind of post on full-disclosure should be used as an example of what-not-to-do.
I've always treated vuln reward programs as resume enhancers. If you submit a bug and get it fixed, you get to show two incredibly valuable and rare skills in the infosec community:
1) technical chops 2) interpersonal skill
Disclosers who have the patience to endure some of the bullshit that comes up in these programs are going to be successful in the security industry. The hardest problems in infosec are not technical. They are cultural. Publicly flaming a vuln reward program because they didn't pay you for what you see as an arbitrary reason is exactly the kind of reason execs do not want to do vuln reward programs. Someone had to fight to get that program set up at paypal. It had to be within the laws of the country that governs the company. This kid just through a temper tantrum in public and signed his name on the email. Any advocates he had at paypal are probably re-evaluating their support of him. So short sighted.
who knew people were saving stuff back in 94-95. hell anyway 18 year old me didn't care, but luckily I can cover for him.
There is a reason that you read about minors running their own businesses all the time. The laws are targeted at employment that is exploitative or interferes with a child's education. Not at things like this.
(Obviously this is country/state specific)
Payment is paid through a verified Paypal account, which you must be 18 years of age to use their services according to their user agreement.