Slightly related, as someone who doesn’t engage in this type of work, I’m curious about the potential risks associated with discovering, testing, and searching for security bugs. While it’s undoubtedly positive that this individual ultimately became a responsible person and disclosed the information, what if they hadn’t? Furthermore, on Discord’s side, what if they were unaware of this person and encountered someone attempting to snoop on this information, mistakenly believing them to be up to no good? Has there been cases where the risk involved wasn’t justified by the relatively low $4k reward? Or any specific companies you wouldn’t want to do this with because of a past incident with them?

If you engage in “white hat security research” on organisations who haven’t agreed to it (such as by offering roles of engagement on a site like hacker one) there is indeed a risk.

For example they might send the police to your door, who’ll tell you you’ve violated some 1980s computer security law.

I know 99.99% of cybercrime goes unpunished, but that’s because the attackers are hard to identify, and in distant foreign lands. As a white hat you’re identifiable and maybe in the same country, meaning it’s much easier to prosecute you.

> Furthermore, on Discord’s side, what if they were unaware of this person and encountered someone attempting to snoop on this information, mistakenly believing them to be up to no good?

Companies will create bug bounty programs where they set ground rules (like no social engineering), and have guides on how to identify yourself as an ethical hacker, for example:

https://discord.com/security

There are laws governing these scenarios. It's different everywhere. Portugal just updated theirs in favor of security researchers: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/portugal-upda...