Bug bounty.. or was it beg bounty / 2022-12-22

In August 2022 I received a report of a cross-site scripting vulnerability in The Virtual Bookcase and the reporter of the vulnerability never replied after I told him there was no financial reward for reporting bugs.

In November the bug report became public at openbugbounty: virtualbookcase.com Cross Site Scripting Vulnerability Report ID: OBB-2858037 - Open Bug Bounty so this confirms my theory of what the vulnerability was. Which I have fixed, but this isn't visible at openbugbounty.

In this case the vulnerability wasn't severe and with the little amount of information I had from the report plus the access logs I was able to fix it. But in other cases the vulnerability may be more complex and the site-owner who deals with a report like this can't just analyze the logfiles to get an idea of where the vulnerability might be.

I don't think the world becomes a safer place if information about vulnerabilities is only available if you pay for it.

The About the Project of the Open Bug Bounty project seems to promote actual 'bounty':

A website owner can express a gratitude to a researcher for reporting vulnerability in a way s/he considers the most appropriate and proportional to the researcher's efforts and help.

As a matter of example, Google pays from $7,500 to $100 per XSS vulnerability submitted by security researchers. But Google is Google, you may adjust your remuneration range to any amounts comfortable for you.

At the same time demanding a bounty before disclosing the bug is not ok on this platform. From the same 'About' page:

We always encourage the researchers to be respectful, responsive and polite, to provide website owners with all reasonable help and assistance.

If a researcher violates the enacted standards of ethics and good faith including but not limited to:

• demanding remuneration to delete a submission
• demanding remuneration to disclose vulnerability details

such submissions will be immediately deleted from our platform.

I hope the next vulnerability disclosure causes less irritation.