My figures come from estimation. I know someone making 75k doing QA for
them, and they employee more QA engineers than you'd imagine. Smaller
companies usually employee 2-10+ for smaller software packages (I've
been a part of some).
The reason I mentioned exploiting the exploiters is being that instead
of hiring the exploiters (or should I say hiring the correct QA
engineers to begin with), they'd rather suck up all of their exploits
without hiring them, so that they can keep boasting they're unhackable
after they make them sign off on not going pubic with the exploits (or
their payment is void). I'm sure if you've been keeping up with vista,
you would have read these "unhackable" claims already.
It's not hard to look up exploit archives and find the authors names in
the exploit headers, do background checks on them, and call up the ones
without insane criminal history. (and to prevent future rebuttal, if its
their handle that only resides in the headers, it's not that hard to
handle->name with a bit of IRC'ing/SMTP'ing).
If you go by ISS each vulnerability type varies in worth.
To state the obvious, you are correct, $0.01- 50k is greater than $0,
yet that's not what I'm trying to point out.
-Cody Tubbs
Chris Poulter wrote:
50k per vulnerability opposed to hundreds (unlikely) 60-100k/year
(unlikely) - the Q/A's might only get 40-50k/year, a security
vulnerability technician would be the one getting paid the big bucks,
but there wouldn't be "hundreds" of them? - how do you work that one out
to be more feasible?
Considering everyone is presuming there will be lots of exploits,
50k/exploit will equate to a much larger payout....
And exploit the exploiters? - how do you figure this one as well?
Someone getting paid 50k/exploit is far more beneficial to the
"exploiter" than getting nothing and just sharing the love....where MS
would lose out more if this happened and leave them more exposed...
I'm not arguing for either side of the case as I haven't looked into it
enough to make my own judgment, but I don't think your assessment is
accurate...
-----Original Message-----
From: listbounce@securityfocus.com [mailto:listbounce@securityfocus.com]
On Behalf Of Cody Tubbs
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 10:40 AM
To: Radu Oprisan
Cc: pen-test@securityfocus.com
Subject: Re: Trend Micro's Vista "0day exploit auction" claim
It's cheaper to pay kids 50k for actually finding flaws, rather than
paying hundreds of QA engineers 60-100k a pop to spend months finding
nothing. Another reason M$ sucks, exploit the exploiters.
-Cody Tubbs
Radu Oprisan wrote:
Ryan Meyer wrote:
A number of popular tech news sources are reporting Trend Micro's
CTO,
Raimund Genes, publicly claiming that there are "auctions" for
zero-day
Windows Vista exploits. Further, he claims these auctions are
fetching
approx $50,000.
Could anyone verify Trend Micro's claim?
It seems dubious, at best, to me and possibly nothing more than pure
FUD.
Sorry to get off topic.
Ryan Meyer
This could also be some covert way for microsoft to find their own
vulnerabilities. That has happened before.
