Great job, Nils. I didn't know Google doubles the reward if it goes to charity.<p>I wonder why Microsoft doesn't have a similar program. Hotmail just got hacked pretty bad[1], and the hackers were selling the vulnerability for chump change in forums[2]. What if they had an incentive to report it to Microsoft instead?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.vulnerability-lab.com/get_content.php?id=529" rel="nofollow">http://www.vulnerability-lab.com/get_content.php?id=529</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.whitec0de.com/new-hotmail-exploit-can-get-any-hotmail-email-account-hacked-for-just-20/" rel="nofollow">http://www.whitec0de.com/new-hotmail-exploit-can-get-any-hot...</a>
A slight tangent, but I'm curious, can Google claim the donation is from Google for tax purposes even though it's under the instruction of Nils instead of him receiving cash? If so, is that why they offer to double it?
I'm always curious as to why such an obvious bug couldn't be detected automatically. Some piece of code is printing a user name without sanitizing it. Fixing that particular bug is easy, but the real challenge is that the existence of the bug proves that your verification methodology has holes.
Nice work InformationWeek. There's nothing like reporting on a story about XSS issues and finding that you have the same issue.<p>Of course, InformationWeek might like to actually <i>fix</i> that bug. Sometime soon?
This is so awesome. White hat security not only to make the internet more secure, but to make the world a better place. Hats off to you man, this is really fantastic.
I wonder what are implications of having XSS on .google.com these days? All auth cookies are likely to be http-only, so probably not a serious vulnerability?
I wrote a blog post about how I found a number of bugs in Gmail.<p><a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2011/12/14/hacking-google-for-fun-and-profit/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2011/12/14/hacking-google...</a>
the InformationWeek XSS is still there:<p><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/influencer/security/616a45777252657276506c6830533652356a525737513d3d" rel="nofollow">http://www.informationweek.com/influencer/security/616a45777...</a>