FYI: We're now paying up to $20,000 for web vulns in our service
Hey,
Hopefully this won't offend the moderators:
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2012/04/spurring-more-vulnerability-research.html
I suspect I know how the debate will be shaped - and I think I can
offer a personal insight. I helped shape our vulnerability reward
program from the start (November 2010), and I was surprised to see
that simply having an honest, no-nonsense, and highly responsive
process like this... well, it works for a surprisingly high number of
skilled researchers, even if you start with relatively modest rewards.
This puts an interesting spin on the conundrum of the black / gray
market vulnerability trade: you can't realistically outcompete all
buyers of weaponized exploits, but you can make the issue a lot less
relevant. By having several orders of magnitude more people reporting
bugs through a "white hat" channel, you are probably making
"underground" vulnerabilities a lot harder to find, and fairly
short-lived.
Cheers,
/mz