If you're good at exploit dev? You can take however much money you want.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitfinex-hacked-hongkong/...

If you're a world class exploit developer working full time, expect earn a few hundred million $ per year.

Of course there exists a whole industry full of people that'll offer you silly 6 digit salaries.

source plz. for white hats, I mean

Probably depends on how willing you are to live and work in China.

Oh, I mean I guess you can probably find some country that'll be able to work out a profit-sharing agreement with you and allow you to legally steal money.

https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cyber/evgeniy-mikhailovich-bogach...

This guy is a good example of someone with a decent career in infosec operating on the right side of the law (Within his own jurisdiction, anyway).

If you want to do charity reporting bugs, then you obviously will get paid like charity workers do.

The question probably wasn't about whether an exploit specialist could net a lot of money, but rather, your claim of "a few hundred million $ per year". That's pretty extraordinary.

How is it extraordinary? Cryptocurrency heists of that scale happen regularly.

Wire fraud in the high tens of millions is a daily thing. Shit out a OWA RCE bug and you can make billions swapping out bank account info in emails.

All the money in the world is controlled by insecure computers, of course skilled exploit devs can drown themselves in it.

You are describing rare, single digit numbers of events that netted enough to be characterized as hundreds of millions / year for a short time period. That's "extraordinary". Meaning that skill alone doesn't guarantee that earning level.

Generally, single digit millions/year seems a reasonable expectation for a very talented (and ethically flexible) exploit practitioner. Beyond that requires luck and right place / right time.

Wire fraud is not rare. You can steal tens of millions by hacking a single companies webmail.

It doesn’t even have to be a company with any infosec staff, think any big factory or a mine. Large wire transfers over email are a daily thing.

I truly believe that the amount of people that could earn hundreds of millions a year doing this full time isn’t even that small.

Hundreds of millions, per year, to a single exploit specialist, is. Not arguing your general point of financial benefit for world class exploit specialists. Just arguing the scale.

The most famous one I'm aware of got $100M over two years and didn't get to keep it. http://fortune.com/2017/04/27/facebook-google-rimasauskas/

Sure, I would expect that most people doing this sort of work don’t actually work full time.

But the amounts of money you could steal with relatively little work are truly immense.

>The most famous one I'm aware of got $100M over two years and didn't get to keep it. >http://fortune.com/2017/04/27/facebook-google-rimasauskas/

This guy seems to be the polar opposite of a world class exploit dev, but he got pretty far.

However he was also a pretty small player, I’m on my phone now but I’ll try to post some useful links in the morning.

>This guy seems to be the polar opposite of a world class exploit dev

Stealing $100M over two years from FB and Google? Sounds world class to me. Social engineering isn't an inferior skill to actual code exploits.

>Stealing $100M over two years from FB and Google?

Yeah, I think at this point the largest actors in this field have stolen $1B+ just by themselves.

>Social engineering isn't an inferior skill to actual code exploits.

For this specific purpose it probably is. With a single webmail exploit you could trivially be stealing similar amounts in days from vast numbers of businesses. All you need to do is automatically (or manually) replace bank account information in the emails. This is a relatively simple task to automate.

A $20M wire being sent to some random bank account copypasted from OWA is nothing out of the ordinary. There are thousands, probably tens of thousands potential targets.

At least the FBI seems to think that these email compromises are a 5 billion dollar industry, https://securityledger.com/2017/05/fbi-business-email-compro... We haven't even seen any fancy 0days being used yet, the whole industry is prime for disruption by more sophisticated, more efficient actors.

In the face of all this it really seems hard to argue that a world class exploit dev couldn't be earning hundreds of millions a year with relative ease.

Google doesn’t support app purchases in China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-02-06/google-...

This has created a strange ecosystem for app stores in China, which depend on vulnerability exploitation in varying degrees for installation privileges.

Maybe some of the work is dual use, but the primary motivation for funding this kind of vuln discovery and exploit development seems to have been App Store ecosystem development in China.

> This has created a strange ecosystem for app stores in China, which depend on vulnerability exploitation in varying degrees for installation privileges.

Can you explain that a bit more? 3rd party app stores are legitimate on Android, so why would they depend on vulnerability exploitation?

I am a little unclear on why they operate the way they do, but the k33n team guys are all employed by Tencent. I’ve asked them about it and this was the rationale they presented.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent