There is a history of companies and organisations threatening legal action against security researchers when they report vulnerabilities in their systems or products.

Sometimes even when the testing has been completely offline - I know people who have downloaded some software, carried out testing against a local copy of it, and then faced legal threats when they tried to report serious security vulnerabilities to the vendor.

It's one of the reasons that some researchers don't bother trying to talk to the vendors and just go straight to full disclosure, or if they do report to vendors they do so anonymously. But if you have to pay, that's creating a link back to yourself which makes the latter much harder.

Yikes. Thanks for the good faith reply. Does EFF help to defend some of these cases?

When you report a vulnerability in a product that means you hacked the product. Hacking is illegal. If it's something that runs on your own computer you might get away but if it runs on a server then it's 100% a felony.