He deserved a whole lot more than $1000 for discovering and reporting such a huge, idiotic security hole that should have never happened in the first place, and it should come out of the salary of whoever caused it by indulging their own laziness and convenience by abusing regular expressions so carelessly and casually.
> and it should come out of the salary of whoever caused it by indulging their own laziness and convenience by abusing regular expressions so carelessly and casually. No. People make mistakes. Honest, unintentional, well-meaning mistakes. Don't punish individuals for being human. Help them learn from them. Don't make individuals afraid to do their job. Should the _organization_ be punished? Should they pay more than…
Some people work in fields where there's an extremely high cost to making mistakes, and whose customers trust them to be careful and meticulous. Those people are paid to be more careful than your average code monkey who churns out regular expressions to save time instead of carefully researching the problem, performing code reviews, and using standard well tested libraries to parse complex but precisely documented standards like html and urls. Developing a browser plug-in to manage passwords is one of them.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. -JWZ