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Re:$36k Google App Engine RCE by gowld on Monday May 21, 2018 @05:59PM (#17122218)
Wow, a digital arms dealer. How is that they have not been destroyed or captured by someone's military?
Re:$36k Google App Engine RCE by tptacek on Monday May 21, 2018 @06:33PM (#17122408)
There are dozens of firms like this, and have been for something like a decade now. The ostensibly totally above-board ones, like Zerodium, aren't "arms dealers"; they're controlled disclosure venues, which capture a premium from big companies and government buyers for access to threat intelligence information before they sit in vendor bug tracking systems for 3-9 months waiting for patches.

There are, of course, real brokers who will buy zero-day vulnerabilities for use by national IC's and LEO's. Their names don't get around like Zerodium's --- Zerodium sponsors conferences --- but they're not hard to find.

If you've got the kind of bug that these firms buy --- essentially, clientside RCE in hugely popular platforms --- you can probably do better selling to them than you can by collecting bounties from the vendors directly. It takes some moral flexibility, though, since really what you're doing is profiting from other people's exposure, and, especially with mobile clientside RCE, what you're really really doing is getting dissidents in Western-friendly dictatorships imprisoned. But you can do that.

But none of these firms (that I know) buy one-off vulnerabilities like a GCE RCE. All the vulnerabilities with high market values have half-lives, which is to say that even after they're patched, it will take weeks, months, or sometimes even years to see them eradicated, which gives them the residual value that props up their market price. In contrast to that, a GCE RCE that was actually exploited would be detected pretty quickly, and shut down with finality in a matter of hours.

Re:$36k Google App Engine RCE by bryandollery on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @07:43AM (#17125202)
It's not morally offensive to profit from the mistakes of a commercial entity. I'd guess that a large portions of companies are ultimately in this class.

And, really, dictators don't need help imprisoning dissidents -- it's sort of in the jobspec. It's not likely that a vuln would cause this to happen unless it was in systems created and secured specifically for sedition, in which case a researcher should be considerate of the potential damage.

Re:$36k Google App Engine RCE by tptacek on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @07:47AM (#17125216)
I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you'd have an easier time selling vulnerabilities than I would.
Re:$36k Google App Engine RCE by chrisbennet on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @12:15PM (#17127039)
"It's not morally offensive to profit from the mistakes of a commercial entity. I'd guess that a large portions of companies are ultimately in this class."

I would find it morally offensive but I'm a naive country bumpkin I guess. I have pointed out something that was mispriced rather than profit from their error. It cost me something like ~$50-100 extra but I slept better.

Re:$36k Google App Engine RCE by rsto on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @03:27AM (#17124264)
I guess IC means "Intelligence Community", but what is a LEO? A Google search didn't provide meaningful results.
Re:$36k Google App Engine RCE by corrigible on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @03:43AM (#17124310)
Probably Law-Enforcement Organization?
Re:$36k Google App Engine RCE by aepiepaey on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @08:45AM (#17125488)
Law Enforcement Officers.
Re:$36k Google App Engine RCE by ryanmarsh on Monday May 21, 2018 @06:02PM (#17122241)
The same way arms dealers stay in business, by being needed.