More importantly, human history shows that ethics really are important. If you ignore ethics in the name of people starving, you build a society where even more people suffer and starve. If you want to build a society where everybody is safe and healthy, you need to pay attention to ethics now, not "someday".
It took many years to understand this.
Speaking of privilege, how much privilege is there in believing that ethics aren't important, because you don't know what it's like to live in a place that never even pretended to care about it, and get robbed on a routine basis, because a bunch of other people around you don't care about ethics either, and would rather form a gang and smash anybody who has something they want than work to build a marketable skill?
That is the world you build when you advocate for people not paying attention to the harms of releasing exploits into the wild, because it might pay better than doing the right thing.
I doubt anybody capable of finding an exploit like this is in that situation
lack of opportunity, lack of skills and lack of work ethic. As in it's easy to do, no barrier to entry and always availble.
Most crimes don't actually pay very well and have poor return if you've got any sort of marketable skills. Armed robbery of a bank will get you on average $1200 and 15-20 years.
But pretending software development isn't a well paying career path, in general, is a statistically incorrect statement
No. Most software that is actually used, is not made 'for free'.
here's some job postings for software engineer in Bordeaux, France: https://www.indeed.fr/Bordeaux-(33)-Emplois-Ingenieur-Inform...
It's around three times less.
Prove me wrong is bad argumentation.
>I know people in other countries don’t make the same salaries but they are “mostly” doing pretty well for their region.
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. Do you have any data to backup your claim?
Yet the vast amount of hacks or attempts typically originate from China or North Korea...
There are a lot of young folks that try to make this their full time job after some success, then get into a dry spell. The panic robs them of the lateral thinking that brought them to the dance to begin with, and they get into spirals of ravenously hunting simple bugs that end up as dupes and out of scope.
I think that's the problem. You shouldn't be entirely dependent on bounty money, because sooner or later you will find a bug that is worth 10x or 1000x on the black market.
I have seen white hat bounty hunters go rouge in such situations and entirely blame it on the cheap ass companies that won't offer the "right" amount.
Nobody owns you anything, you are doing this mostly for fun. The bounty is just a bonus.
That's missing a key point of the bounty system. Slack and its users are better off that this bug was 1: discovered and 2: responsibly reported. The bounty increases the number of eyes looking, but also incentivizes folks to look into weird crashes or fight through the drudgery of triaging odd behavior.
The bug value also shows how much Slack here values their security, and makes me wary of them if I was in the place to be a customer of theirs.
Most directly it shows how they value a bug bounty program. There are companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year and have thousands of people in their infosec program that don’t have bug bounty programs.
You can extrapolate that to how they value security but that’s not necessarily directly correlated.
Such as?
- Work on a bounty program that rewards mitigations instead of exploits (e.g., https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/patch-rewards/). Those are much more deterministic. (But there's no black market for them.)
- Get a conventional job (possibly in software, possibly not), which pays you on a schedule.
I get the argument you're making about money, but I'm having trouble believing that going after bug bounties ever makes sense to someone in that situation, given how non-deterministic it is to find a bug.
Also (as this bug shows), it typically takes a long time between reporting a bug and having the responding team decide that it merits a bounty. In this case it took a month. (And then there's logistics about actually getting you the money at that point.) Are people who haven't eaten for a few days really going to be happy not eating for another month, even if they get a hundred thousand dollars then?
https://hackerone.com/slack/bounty_table_versions?type=team&...
If you haven't had food for a few days everything is indeed about money. Either you reward someone properly for the work that they can do or they'll find someone else who does. I doubt most people get fuzzy warm feelings helping a big US corporation that's too greedy to actually pay independent researchers properly.
Edit: That's not to say your work wasn't cool btw. It's very admirable for you to view it the way you do.