[oskarsv]

I agree with you. It's super low, but I and others will just ignore it in the future and ultimately they lose.

However, bug bounties are not a job. Nobody is forced or obligated to do anything. I'm giving them 'a pass' in the future :) It's great people are discussing this and surely it will improve things for future researchers.

I consider bug bounties like competitions. The 'prize money' is defined beforehand. You don't have to compete if you don't want it. You can also compete for the 'notoriety'. Knowing the stakes, do you complain after getting 'first place'?

Everything you own or do is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it, everything else is just speculation.

[fancythat]

In my country there is a sort of obligation to get 10% of value in case you find something valuable but is more applied to found money. Many times people just return what they have found without taking any reward. This could be extrapolated to bug bounties as well. How much would Slack or its clients potentially loose, if this bug was exploited? I think that everybody could agree on some sum, lets say 200k USD. In that case 20k should be paid.

Another approach is to take invoice for last security audit and simply pay the whole amount of that invoice to the researcher. If none was ever done (good God!), just some usual quote for pen testing the targeted application could be applied.

HackerOne could also enforce minimum payouts per exploit category.

[hashkb]

What you do, though, is objectively more valuable to Slack than you were paid. They have reframed security as the competition you mention, but the stakes are much higher and they're sidestepping with this issue of "responsible reporting".

[chrisseaton]

> What you do, though, is objectively more valuable to Slack than you were paid.

This is a meaningless statement.

Obviously all work is more valuable to the company than what they pay you to do the work... otherwise they wouldn't pay you would they? Because they'd get nothing out of it.

If your work generates £5 for a company, then why would they pay you £5 or £6 for it? What's in it for them?

[IncRnd]

Payments from a company are subjective not objective. There is a single purchaser, in this case Slack, and the researcher already said that he wouldn't engage in unethical behaviour to make more money. Just sell the vulnerability to Slack, and be done with it.

Business owners of failing businesses, when they go to sell, many times think, "I've put in a million hours for this, so I need a million dollars." But, that will never happen.

[Voliokis]

> However, bug bounties are not a job. Nobody is forced or obligated to do anything. I'm giving them 'a pass' in the future :) It's great people are discussing this and surely it will improve things for future researchers.

Shouldn't people like you be able to do this for a living if you want to? It's valuable work. It has real market value. It seems like you're doing this for fun and genuine interest and I do admire that. Maybe you don't want to taint your motivation with the idea of "how much money can I get for this?" I get that too. But as an outsider, I see this low pay-out and I see exploitation under the guise of "doing the right thing". I genuinely want you to be paid more. You deserve it.

I feel like the only way this kind of thing will change is if people are more vocal about how inappropriate the low compensation is for a company like Slack. Public criticism is necessary and, unfortunately, the only tool we have nowadays to effect change. I understand if this isn't a hill you want to die on, but I hope that other people (particularly people who aren't in bug hunting) are willing to pressure Slack to reconsider its policies.

The problem with "others will ignore it in the future and ultimately they lose" is that it's a passive signal that is too easily overlooked and ignored. It never reaches anybody with any kind of influence who can make changes. If a big exploit happens and somebody does a root cause analysis, it's never going to lead to the conclusion that "well, it's because we haven't been paying enough in our bug bounty program, we need to change that", if only because there's no data about how many people passed on helping them out because of the low payouts.

[oskarsv]

Yes they should and I think I could. This exploit was more of a fun challenge.

I support and agree to everything you are saying. I love the community response. I too loathe the bug bounty asymmetry in power between corporations and reporters, but it exists.. by design. How do you imagine a researcher can 'demand' more money in this situation? They can choose the amounts arbitrarily and there is nothing legal or ethical you can do about it.

I haven't seen any proposals for real solutions - how would you ask this? How do you decide the amount for each company? Solutions, which do not bypass ethics or laws. I hope that 'the market' will solve this eventually and I think I at least raised awareness.

[tptacek]

Vulnerability researchers with track records make more than software developers do. This whole thread is pretty weird.