Groupon Refuses To Pay Security Expert Who Found Serious XSS Site Bugs

Mark Wilson writes: Bounty programs benefit everyone. Companies like Microsoft get help from security experts, customers gain improved security, and those who discover and report vulnerabilities reap the rewards financially. Or at least that's how things are supposed to work. Having reported a series of security problems to discount and deal site Groupon, security researcher Brute Logic from XSSposed.org was expecting a pay-out — but the site refuses to give up the cash. In all, Brute Logic reported more than 30 security issues with Groupon's site, but the company cites its Responsible Disclosure policy as the reason for not handing over the cash.

Comments

Re:He screwed up.

[Dutch Gun]

Except, his "one mistake" was bragging about his find to his buddies (the exploits were found and submitted, so there was no reason to do so), and Oops! it went public, obviously in a way that Groupon happened to spot it as well*. Now it's essentially out in the wild before a fix was in, however you want to spin it. That's the exact opposite of "responsible disclosure". If you tell someone else about an exploit, even in private, you no longer have control of that information. Groupon is, I think, making a point that they take the "responsible disclosure" part of that agreement seriously.

Note in the article:

He also points out that another company, Sucuri Security, was happy to pay out even after a tweet revealed some details of a security flaw in their product.

Was this also by him, meaning this isn't the first time he's done this? Or one of his colleagues? How do you accidentally tweet about an undisclosed security disclosure? Is it too much to ask them to simply NOT blab about it to others in public forums? Either way, it learns like these guys need to learn how to keep their mouths shut about the vulnerabilities they discover until the fix is confirmed, that is, if they actually want a bounty. What the hell is so hard about NOT talking about a security exploit you've discovered? Ok, sort of a dick move by Groupon (no surprise), but it's hard for me to feel too sorry for this guy either.

* My theory is that Groupon was actually emailed that the vulnerability was made public on XSSposed.org. If a company doesn't respond, XSSposed simply publishes the vulnerability and emails a notification to the webmaster, as they seem to be all about public exposure. This site also gives "rankings" to security researches, so there seems to be an incentive to share the details of an exploit before it's fixed with others on the site in order to get "credit" for the discovery (and this guy is that the top of the list), which seems like a really bad incentive.