Why should another dev ever bother submitting a security issue to Yahoo if they have to deal with such obstinate silliness?
Why should another dev ever bother submitting a security issue to Yahoo if they have to deal with such obstinate silliness?
Although our project is much smaller, we also run a bounty program through HackerOne, and publish aggregate results every month. You can see them under the "Security" headers of the changelog for the last few months to get a quick sense of the overall composition of reports that come through a channel like this, at least for our project:
http://phabricator.org/changelog/
For example, last month we received 49 reports, of which we believe 5 were legitimate security issues which we fixed and awarded. Although the signal on this channel is extremely valuable, it's embedded in a lot of noise, and separating the two is often difficult and time consuming. It wouldn't surprise me if we made mistakes with a few reports even at this relatively small scale, and we have a much easier task than larger projects do.
I'm extremely supportive of HackerOne, but I'm always a little worried we'll make a mistake and end up tried in the court of public opinion when we triaged >99% of the reports correctly and the overall impact of the program is hugely beneficial for researchers, for us, and for our users.
Of course, we should be aiming for 100%, and getting it right almost all the time isn't a free pass for the cases when things go wrong, but seeing just the cases where an issue wasn't handled correctly discards a lot of context.
Basically doing a bug bounty right is very hard.
Stuff like this will happen. By running a bug bounty at all you are opening your company up to situations like this but the bigger picture is that you care about security enough to still do it for the valid security issues bug bounties find. It is a strong signal to me that a company actually cares about security and we shouldn't lose focus of that in the midst of pitchfork-waving "but yahoo was WRONG".
We recently released some stats that support all this here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-bug-bounty/bug-bount...