How these companies don't hire kids like Daniel for pennies on the dollar and have him attack their stacks on a loop baffles me. Pay the kid $50k/yr (part time, he still needs to go to school) to constantly probe your crappy stacks. Within a year or two you'll have the most goddamn secure company on the internet - and no public vulns to embarrass you.

That's a bit simplistic.

If you sign a contract with a "hacker", then you are expecting results. Otherwise how do you decide to renew the contract next year? How do you decide to raise it next year? What if, during this contract, a vulnerability that this individual didn't found is exploited? You get rid of them?

So you're putting pressure on a person who is a researcher, not a producer. Which is wrong.

And also there's the scale. Sure, here you have one guy who exploited a vulnerability. But how long it took them to get there? There's probably dozens of vulnerabilities yet to be exploited, requiring skills that differ so much from the ones used by this person that they won't find them. Even if you pay them for a full-time position.

Whereas, if you set up a bug bounty program, you are basically crowdsourcing your vulnerabilities: not only you probably have thousands of people actively trying to exploit vulnerabilities in your system, but also, you only give money to the ones that do manage to exploit one. You're only paying on result.

Obviously, if the reward is not big enough, they could be tempted to sell them to someone else or use them themselves. But the risk is here no matter how you decide to handle this topic.

It's not quite that simple. I don't think most bug bounty participants want a full-time job. But even more-so in my experience they are not security generalists. You can hire one person who is good at finding obscure XSS vulns, another that's good at exploiting cloud privilege escalation in IAM role definitions, another that's good at shell or archive exploits. If you look at profiles on H1 you'll see most good hackers specialize in specific types of findings.

I doubt it.

Just because he found one vulnerability at one vendor used by Discord doesn't mean he'll find all the vulnerabilities that exist at Discord or indeed any of them.

Having been adjacent to this for years, it's because it's a cost center and not attached to the bonus of any product or program manager. Every now and then we'll get an advocate for security/integrity at a company but the effort lives and leaves with them.

Microsoft, after getting beat up over this for decades, is still horrible at it. In my area they're have been enforced regulations for years but they're written by the industry itself and infected with compliance managers and thus result in wastes of effort that makes compliance managers that came over from HR and legal happy with their eternal job security and minimal hard work.

Until some heavy handed top down regulation, written by people who understand the nature of ongoing security and software and embedded lifecycles, it's going to stay like this. Most existing supply chain regulation I've seen ends up saying "vet your vendors" and gives minimal practical guidance of how to actually do that. Likelihood of some really good law coming out of the current US administration and business climate is left as a comedy for the reader.

I feel like the "I'm a 16 year old high school senior" thing is some kind of social engineering- his knowledge seems a bit too broad.

But who knows.

I wonder if this analogy could work: if some random visitor pointed out your storage room's key is nearly broken and anybody could come in now and steal your store's stock. You'd be thankful, but would you hire them to come from time to time to check if they have any other insight ? Probably not ?

If you really saw a recurring security risk you'd have many other better use of your money.

While I would love that for the kid I dont think these companies care about security at all.