“They will ruin my life”: Microsoft threatens to wield ‘Digital Crimes Unit’ over exploit disclosures — causing uproar in the cybersecurity community (UPDATE)

Having known a fair few cybersecurity researchers in my time, I know that Microsoft is something of a controversial figure.

Being the largest operating system in the world, Windows is often the target of hacks and exploits, alongside Microsoft’s cloud Azure. Russian-backed hackers breached Microsoft’s 365 layer last year, for example, compromising U.S. government official accounts.

To combat this, Microsoft is known to work with prolific and not-so-prolific security researchers, sometimes called whitehat hackers, who test Microsoft’s security layers and then report the issues. Microsoft has a bug bounty program to that end, where ethical hackers can report exploits for a major pay day. At least, in theory.

I know from my experience working with Xbox and Windows sources that actually getting paid is often more difficult than Microsoft’s documentation suggests. I know more than a couple of researchers who weren’t compensated fairly in the past, and to speculate, this latest drama…