Where's a professional vulnerability researcher I can read making the same case? My feed is full of researchers saying how great this is, and how big an accomplishment it was that Katie Moussouris and her team managed to pull it off after Microsoft publicly declared itself opposed to bug bounties.
The work required to build reliable exploits against hardened Windows can take months. Why shouldn't researchers be compensated for that work? If you don't want to accept payment for it, that's fine; don't. But why is it bad for other people to do so?
I'm not arguing about compensation, I'm arguing about public safety. People and organizations selling exploits are effectively complicit in the damage resulting from their sales.
That's exactly my point, which is why it's dangerous. If the exploits were made public as soon as possible (full disclosure) then MS will have incentive to release bugfixes as soon as possible to the general public.
By taking the cash, I am sure you are bound by secrecy enforced by jail time. I see these increased payments as hush money to keep researchers quiet while they feed them to the NSA for zero day exploits.
Not to mention, the outsider is a complete unknown. Are they an upstanding white hat? Or are they the darkest of greys? You have no idea.
At least an internal employee is on your payroll, and has been screened with a background check. You don't get to screen which people get to discover vulnerabilities.
While that might decrease the total number of days in a year when there are unpatched exploits that MS knows about, it would increase the total number of days in a year when there are exploits known to hackers. I don't think that would make us safer.
Microsoft releases this exploit information to governments as a matter of policy, and the governments accordingly conduct clandestine operations and cyber-attacks using this exploit information.
MS is in the unique position of being the only ones able to fix the exploit so they are a single-point-of-failure, which diminishes the security of everybody using Windows operating systems.
No, Microsoft releases vulnerability information to the government along with private companies in the antivirus and intrusion prevention space. They do this because they have a coordinated patch schedule that creates windows of known vulnerability.
Microsoft does not have the in-house expertise to feed exploits to anyone.
> Microsoft does not have the in-house expertise to feed exploits to anyone.
I agree with you everywhere else in this thread, but you are clearly not up to speed on who works there if you believe that to be accurate. Some of the best exploit writers, who have pioneered new classes of techniques, work at Microsoft (because Microsoft went on a recruiting spree to target them).
I know who works there and believe my statement to be accurate; remember, we're talking about the total volume of all vulnerabilities discovered in Microsoft products.
If you are narrowing the scope of your claim to say that Microsoft doesn't have the expertise to write exploits for every version of every product affected by every vulnerability, ok, sure. That isn't what was suggested though, and isn't something any reasonable person would have implied.
Then again, the notion that Microsoft dedicates resources to serve as an outsourcing shop for NSA hackers to develop "cyber weapons" no longer has "reasonable person" anywhere on the horizon. That's not even worth entertaining, I just had to interject because I thought you were saying MS doesn't have good exploit writers ;)
I do think the MAPP equivalent for governments, probably as an unintended side effect, grants some advantage to parts of the .gov interested in attacking the products. How much, and whether or not they need it, is another story. But I agree that the NSA sure doesn't need their help - it's probably just a bit of free gravy if anything.
And in Microsoft's defense, it really wouldn't matter if they gave them to the NSA or not. The distribution list is very large, and the teams who ultimately receive that content are not vetted in any way.
The work required to build reliable exploits against hardened Windows can take months. Why shouldn't researchers be compensated for that work? If you don't want to accept payment for it, that's fine; don't. But why is it bad for other people to do so?