that is... not great. shame on microsoft.
its actions like that which shed light on why we get the nighmare eclipses of the world. pressuring a kid into handing over full editorial control of a disclosure is gross.
I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records (blog.faav.net)
255 pointsby luispa2 days ago110 comments
john_strinlai 10 hours ago
>Microsoft had editorial control over this post, cutting sections and figures and reshaping how the impact is described before publication.
igleria 9 hours ago
reminds me of a former job in which my goodbye letter was heavily editorialized...
the__alchemist 8 hours ago
Would love to hear more.
ceroxylon 8 hours ago
I will tell my story: I found a huge accounting error that allowed for several employees to embezzle funds. I disclosed it to the main stakeholders and some people went to jail. The accounting team still refused to acknowledge that the mistake was theirs, so I left on principle.
A few weeks later, I was talking to an old colleague and they revealed that the story that came from stakeholders was that the accounting team found the error, and I left in disgrace (despite that not being my department?).
So if you find an embarrassing mistake and you do not control the narrative, you have to proceed very carefully.
sdcfgy 7 hours ago
Had one like that. I quit and they blamed me for a project failure after the fact. That pissed off a couple of colleagues who thought it might happen to them. They also quit leaving them entirely without a software team. Set them back ten years because they didn’t make the market in time.
Write everything down and make sure everyone knows you’re writing it down. Saves a lot of hassle like that.
itslennysfault 6 hours ago
> the story that came from stakeholders was that the accounting team found the error, and I left in disgrace (despite that not being my department?).
That sounds like defamation to me.
rkagerer 9 hours ago
Love to hear more on the motivation for agreeing to this.
e.g. The $5000? Amnesty from being sued?
srdjanr 9 hours ago
Also he's 16. I'd definitely be less willing to push back (especially on something like this) at his age
p-e-w 8 hours ago
Of course not. You don’t push back on something like that. You hire a lawyer and let them do the pushing for you. If you contact the right NGO, they might even give you one for free.
There’s no way I’d sign any agreement with a company like Microsoft regarding an issue like that without a lawyer. I’d rather not disclose at all if those were the only options.
saghm 8 hours ago
I don't know about you, but when I was 16, I never hired a lawyer, and none of the other 16 year olds I knew had either
snapplebobapple 8 hours ago
I've seen hackers. Even if you do it right you're still going to get banned from the internet till you are 18 and dating Angelina Jolie is not the draw it was 20 years ago....
stronglikedan 6 hours ago
> dating Angelina Jolie is not the draw it was 20 years ago....
not not either. where do I sign up?
eecc 5 hours ago
She’s glorious in the movie, though she does play the part of an extremely high maintenance woman uncannily well…
dfxm12 5 hours ago
There are so many great one liners in that move. An underrated one is when Dade's mom opens the door, sees Acid Burn and says "now I see what all the fuss is about".
patmorgan23 4 hours ago
I mean when you're sixteen, you can sign a legally binding contract (might depend on the jurisdiction). Usually you have to be above the age of majority (18) or be emancipated before you can enter into a binding contract.
0x1ch 7 hours ago
At that age in the mid 2000s, I would be foaming at the mouth to tell a FANG company to eat dirt over something like a disclosure + unpaid bounty. But if he got the money and didn't negotiate... You live and you learn.
xeromal 4 hours ago
iamverybadass
0x1ch 3 hours ago
Well yeah. Why else would you tell off a massive company in the FANG circle as a budding security researcher in their teens.
drfloyd51 2 hours ago
A good move is to negotiate in good faith. You show you can’t be pushed around and you are able to be civil. And most importantly, you know your worth.
icantevenhold 9 hours ago
Not getting your life ruined by getting sued by a trillion dollar company sounds like a pretty good motivation
john_strinlai 7 hours ago
i think the answer is simple: they're a kid, and microsoft bullied them.
menomatter 7 hours ago
Speaking of being sue, I once found a hole in a healthcare system. I solicited legal advice and the response was overwhelmingly against reporting. The company didn’t not have a bounty program. So I shut up knowing my info is sitting there exposed.
I wonder what’s the consensus on this? Do people normally report it or not?
On some forms I was advised to report hippa complaint. I can’t remember if I did. This was 10 or more years ago.
john_strinlai 7 hours ago
>Do people normally report it or not?
if you are reporting it for moral/ethical reasons, but are worried that the company will have a shitty response, report it anonymously to the company and any relevant regulatory bodies.
but most companies, even without a bounty program, are happy to receive reports. a lack of a bounty program isn't really an indicator of how they will treat reporters, as most companies are ill-equipped to have a proper bounty program.
otherwise, and i know this is an unpopular opinion here, but i'm a big advocate of just posting the exploit publicly when a company makes it hard/scary to report it to them.
Computer0 6 hours ago
don't worry you are popular with me
menomatter 6 hours ago
My issue was knowing that reporting would allow them to possibly discover my identity. Discovering the vul in itself may instead be considered unauthorized access.
SahAssar 6 hours ago
I think my take would be to report it anonymously (via support/marketing/etc.) and in the report strongly encourage them to create a path for security reports (either via a bounty or just a security email). When fixed or actually dismissed post publicly on anonymous channels, with a section saying how they could have created a channel for these reports.
mikeryan 6 hours ago
Sounds like he’s gotten bug bounties from MS in the past. Might be forward thinking to keep the relationship amicable going forward.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to Microsoft it seems like a pretty complete write up. If the changes weren’t material that might have been part of it too.
And he’s 16. Parents might have had a say.
xyst 5 hours ago
_I am jack's complete lack of surprise_
This is a company that has engaged in heavy monopolistic behavior and violating US anti-trust laws with reckless abandon. They have even pioneered the infamous "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy.
M$ will never change. The modus operandi is always the same, regardless of which ever lame MBA douchebag is running the shit show.
If we want to actually care , rather than spew off platitudes, break up big tech.
aw4rzs 5 hours ago
They should have paid him at least a $1 million bounty if they're going to ask for editorial control of the disclosure.
sdfhbdf 10 hours ago
> awarded $5000
It's a little perplexing. Of course it's always a controversial topic since it's difficult to value an exploit, but whenever we read about these online, which probably goes through some survivorship bias, they seem pretty low.
On https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/bounty it seems the top is $100,000 or $250,000 depending which program this counts under.
What does HN think? Why would it be only $5000?
muglug 10 hours ago
As I understand it, bug bounty awards are a rough proxy for "would nation-state actors be able to exploit this for operational purposes without getting caught".
Zero-click iPhone exploits that affect the current OS and also previous ones are worth hundreds of thousands.
buckle8017 10 hours ago
Try 10-20 million USD for a zero click iPhone exploit.
yieldcrv 8 hours ago
thats the true market value of bug bounty awards
the unilaterally set awards by the affected corporation are far lower and based on the price of the researcher’s liability
Perz1val 10 hours ago
Microsoft's bounty program and payouts are known to be pathetic, see that nightmare eclipse situation
bix6 10 hours ago
$5k is a literal penny for Microsoft. Give the kid $100k.
k2xl 9 hours ago
Per their market cap...
3.85 billion is actually closer to a "penny" for Microsoft.
poly2it 9 hours ago
Operating income for Microsoft was $128.5 billion in 2025.
TeMPOraL 8 hours ago
I think HN, like a lot of people in this industry, have strongly skewed perception of the actual importance of these bugs.
You could view the bounty prices as market evidence that most of this is rightfully treated as nothingburgers. I.e. the alternative to paying $5000 to some random person for this class of vulnerability research is not risking a trillion dollar hack the next day - it's just risking shmaybe some kerfuffle down the line, followed by fixing it through normal triage process. The bounty program is as much marketing as security, and $5000 is probably about the right price for marginal effort into sustaining the "we are treating security seriously" message.
In a way, the very existence of those bug bounty programs in large companies is evidence they don't see a reason to treat vulnerabilities seriously enough to proactively find and fix them in-house.
If security vulnerabilities would be anywhere serious as most commenters on-line seem to think, companies would pay hundreds of thousands for serious vulnerabilities, just to save a day before they get hit by them - on top of spending millions in-house to try and stay ahead of the attackers.
But they don't. Because most exploits are inconsequential and/or aren't being exploited much.
TedDoesntTalk 44 minutes ago
Some do pay that kind of money. You just don’t hear about those, and there’s certainly no blog posts about them.
giancarlostoro 8 hours ago
What's worse is the alternative is winding up like Aaron Swartz... (all he did was scrape PDFs for mostly public funded / tax funded papers) Which is even worse, I think I'd be glad to receive $20 for Starbucks instead of being legally chased for showing them they messed up.
There should really be laws for protecting security researchers who produce 0 harm and divulge / share a vulnerability with a service provider. I'd rather the floor be getting no money AND not going to jail or being sued.
elmer2 7 hours ago
"all he did was scrape PDFs for mostly public funded / tax funded papers"
He wasn't a security researcher. He broke into a room and used equipment to steal information. It wasn't just 'tax funded papers'. Companies invested millions of dollars into some of this research.
We shouldn't support theft and he should have gotten some jail time/punishment for it.
"There should really be laws for protecting security researchers who produce 0 harm and divulge / share a vulnerability with a service provider. I'd rather the floor be getting no money AND not going to jail or being sued."
Too many 'security researchers' demand money or threaten to release the vulnerabilities.
I don't know anyone that got into trouble going through a legit bug bounty program.
thereader12 7 hours ago
I have not done a deep dive so I could be wrong, weren't these papers published (or soon to be)? Wasn't the one and only group with negative effects the Journals that could extract a fee? Especially with researchers usually happy to send a copy? This wasn't someone stealing trade secrets they weren't even secret.
mosseater 2 hours ago
It was a protest against the monetization of academic knowledge.
You can call that "theft" as much as you want. There are lots of people like Aaron out there that think this sort of information should be freely available.
Just because there is a law doesn't mean that that law is just and correct. Saying we "shouldn't support theft" is an over-simplification of the situation.
omoikane 8 hours ago
Every HN post regarding security exploits inevitably results in some comment saying the bounty is too low. I find it helpful to read previous comments by tptacek regarding bug bounties and market values:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This one probably has the best summary:
elmer2 7 hours ago
This is correct. I've made well over six figures over the last couple of years through bug bounty programs. I wouldn't spend months finding one bug. It's usually days or a week or two max.
$5,000 is actually pretty normal for a critical. I think the most I received for one bug was around $10,000, but this is the exception.
AI has also ruined the market. I'm a security consultant (where I make most of my money) and stopped bug bounty once AI slop reports made it impossible to actually get anything triaged in a timely manner.
Something else many don't know is that with all of the major platforms, customers can see the bugs before they are even triaged by the platform team. Many companies are now taking advantage of the long triage times and fixing the bugs before the researcher can get paid. It's then marked as a duplicate and the researcher gets nothing.
msdz 6 hours ago
> Many companies are now taking advantage of the long triage times and fixing the bugs before the researcher can get paid. It's then marked as a duplicate and the researcher gets nothing.
Isn’t that just a speedrun-encouragement for selling the exploit not to the one offering the product, but an attacker offering more (in this case, >$0 is not difficult to exceed) instead?
dfxm12 5 hours ago
If money is your motivation, you probably wouldn't consider disclosing the bugs in the first place.
xnickb 3 hours ago
If there was an easy way to extract value out of any particular kind of a vulnerability, it'd cost much more and thus the bounty would've been higher.
xyst 5 hours ago
The young researcher is a teenager. Getting your name out there, clout/influence/fame, is worth $1M to them.
It’s almost like most of you people have already forgotten your teenage years. And it shows. Doesn’t matter the decade or generation. A teenager , likely living with parents or grandparents, will always prioritize intangibles.
A mere 5 bands for full editorial control is quite literally peanuts for M$. It’s yet another case of abusing free labor, unfortunately.
xnyan 4 hours ago
> quite literally peanuts
If I have an income of $250k/yr and a pack of peanuts costs $2 or very roughly 0.001% of my annual income, the equivalent peanut money for ~$130 billion a year microsoft would be more like $2 million.
julianeon 5 hours ago
I personally think it sets a bad precedent: you want to broadcast that valuable info will be treated as such. A hacker in the future will see this, compare the "precedent" price to the black market, and not even ask Microsoft the next time.
keithnz an hour ago
many of these people want to work in security, selling to the black market will legally and professionally screw you.
throwaway2037 10 hours ago
> Hey! I’m Faav. A little over a year ago, when I was 15, I published Break into any Microsoft building: Leaking PII in Microsoft Guest Check-In, my first Microsoft write-up. I’m 16 now, and this one is a little bigger.
bsoqk 9 hours ago
You assume that whoever was responsible for the implementation of this feature cares in the slightest beyond “it seems to work”.
lurk2 8 hours ago
His comment didn’t assume that at all.
bsoqk 2 hours ago
It’s the way I interpreted the “got schooled” part. If you don’t try your best, or in fact do the bare minimum, if someone beats you they can’t say they “schooled” you.
ToucanLoucan 8 hours ago
Honestly that series of blog posts that came across here semi-recently about what an utter disaster the Azure team is (through little fault of their own, mind you), combined with a lot of things I've read about the development behind Halo Infinite, have convinced me Microsoft is to avoided whenever possible. It's not even that they're too big to care, though that is an issue. It's that organizationally they are SO reliant on short-term contractors and junior devs plugging away with copilot, along with an ever more exhausted group of seniors who actually work for them but are continually disempowered, that I think it's safe to say anything they manage to ship is a minor miracle if it works at all, and it's certainly not going to have any guarantee at all of solid software engineering fundamentals.
And to be clear, this is not an issue with them using contractors, overseas or otherwise, or with their senior dev staff, or even with AI really. It's an issue with them organizationally being so incredibly penny-pinching, and so dedicated to shipping new shit versus fixing anything long term, constantly chasing new revenue and letting their existing offerings rot.
If a Microsoft product is good nowadays, it is literally a miracle.
TeMPOraL 8 hours ago
You assume there is any actual reason to care more than that in this case.
ocdtrekkie 8 hours ago
Physical security vendors usually stop exactly there. I can't count how many vendors responsible for badge systems shut off the Windows Firewall just because it’s easier than adding a rule.
verst 10 hours ago
There is an internal library at Microsoft that reliably avoids all these JWT problems - Microsoft Identity Service Essentials (MISE). Adopting MISE and upgrading to the latest versions of it have been part of the Secure Future Initiative (SFI) that can be read about in the news of previous years. Unfortunately it sounds like the service team intentionally deferred the compliance alerts they will have received.
jhfdbkofdchk 9 hours ago
There is so much work to do for SFI that is still being ignored. The only way that some of these services will update is by being the target of the red team, security researcher, or threat actor.
verst 9 hours ago
And all of that is definitely happening.
That being said, just last night I observed that the identity team is now opening up agent-assisted PRs against individual service team repos to force MISE adoption and upgrade to the latest version and best practices. I think that's a great thing because many individual service teams simply lack the bandwidth or knowledge. Prior to GenAI availability I wasted many cycles on this kind of work. While GenAI made it easier - internal source documentation still does not unambiguously address every use case. So having the identity team drive this now with the help of agent sessions initiated by them is great.
rdtsc 9 hours ago
> {"alg":"none","typ":"JWT"}
I don't know how this ever became a thing that was allowed into the spec and then picked from the spec and implemented in various implementations.
flowerlad 8 hours ago
It should be retroactively removed the spec, and all implementations should remove the "none" algorithm. It is a huge security hole.
pixl97 8 hours ago
Yea, and it was a big issue years ago. I can't believe there is any modern implementation that has it.... or another way to put this is, how old is this damned implementation they are using?
er0k 10 hours ago
wow I am so surprised to hear once again how JWTs are terrible
fabian2k 10 hours ago
Someone not verifying the signature at all is not a mistake where you can blame the JWT spec itself.
buckle8017 9 hours ago
JWT is complicated.
Complexity is a spec failure in security issues.
It's that simple.
meindnoch 9 hours ago
They did verify the signature, and it was correct according to the "none" algorithm.
alex_suzuki 9 hours ago
“Works as designed.”
fabian2k 9 hours ago
Argh, I missed that it actually uses the "none" algorithm. Yeah, the existence of that option is extremely dumb and it shouldn't be possible to use that. I misread the post and thought it was a regular JWT, but they simply didn't validate it.
Perz1val 10 hours ago
Idk if that's not too much of an oversimplification, maybe more like JWTs are an indicator/enabler of architecture level bugs?
skhameneh 10 hours ago
Other commenters are suggesting you can’t blame the spec for end implementation mistakes, except that’s one of the many issues - JWT being so error-prone is a problem.
I use JWT just for handling of tokens, because it’s so well supported, but I won’t use it for anything more than token storage _because_ it is so vulnerable to mistakes.
The fact that mistakes are so easy to make is indicative of poor design in the spec itself.
talon8635 9 hours ago
Does this extend to OIDC? I’m not knowledgeable on the topic but it uses JWT right? Is it also prone to poor implementation? If you just error on alg=none does that solve it?
f311a 10 hours ago
What is Antares? Can't find anything related to it except for the 1B model, which does not seem to be capable of autoresearch.
UPD: It's his personal bot.
Alifatisk 10 hours ago
> I also started building AI into how I hunt, which led me to develop Antares, my personal AI hackbot.
hackernudes 6 hours ago
Pretty confusing, there is a Cisco Antares small language model... https://blogs.cisco.com/ai/introducing-antares-the-most-effi...
Guess everything is just going to be named after stars for awhile.
zk 4 hours ago
The kicker... only 5k reward for this is insane. That said probably the attacker didn't need to run as many queries as they did...
09/17/26 - Awarded $5,000
khalic 10 hours ago
You’re going places kid :) keep up the good work
matroxmemories 10 hours ago
Possibly jail if the wrong people get upset.
Waterluvian 10 hours ago
Great way to use up that 6-10 years of vacation and sabbatical time.
bix6 10 hours ago
Well college isn’t worth it according to the Thiel crowd so maybe this will be better.
charcircuit 5 hours ago
Seriously, who is responsible for "none" JWT tokens. It has caused so many critical security bugs over the years.
moat 8 hours ago
This kid is 16?
Can’t wait to see what he’s up to in 10 years.
Ylpertnodi 28 minutes ago
Ai.
Saving us from.
jdw64 3 hours ago
I wish I had that kind of talent when I was 16 too... I'm jealous.
And it's really amazing. I wish I could think like that, and it's impressive how deeply you immerse yourself in it.
froggertoaster 6 hours ago
Geohot vibes
sdcfgy 10 hours ago
Wait until someone does that to your favourite cloud provider's customer data.
ocdtrekkie 6 hours ago
Entra has already had vulnerabilities where a user in one tenant could access global admin of every other tenant. Somehow everyone didn't immediately move off Microsoft's cloud platforms.
darepublic 4 hours ago
> I’m 16 now, and this one is a little bigger.
Holy! Child prodigy
gnarlouse 9 hours ago
If a 15yo can find it
nenadg 9 hours ago
You should have.
advael 8 hours ago
This is a pretty typical example of the security posture of microsoft, and yet people continually buy their arguments that open-source and therefore auditable alternatives are inherently less secure than their "trust me bro"
starkeeper 7 hours ago
Only $5K when you saved them millions. Pretty cheap!
Kuyawa 10 hours ago
Next time you find a bug like that, offer it to the black market, you could make millions instead of measly salty peanuts
sdcfgy 10 hours ago
I bet someone already did that and didn't disclose it.
arm32 10 hours ago
Now some blackhat somewhere can't afford their monthly Lamborghini payment.