Cursor asks researchers to report vulnerabilities to their GitHub security page.

The same incentive to show impact applies even without a paid bounty.

> Cursor does not have a bug bounty

Shouldn't this alone be considered criminal negligence at this point? Cursor isn't some random open source project. It's a company that has funding, and subscriptions. Hell, I pay Cursor for a monthly subscription. Pretty incredible that they have no bounty program.

The problem there though, is that with PoCs like this, as an attacker you want to have a ping back to your system so that you know the attack has been successful (in this case they probably expected/hoped someone at Cursor to install the package, that's the usual objective in a dependency confusion attack). But what they could have done, is send a less sensitive thing like just the current working directory or current effective user, instead of the whole environment.

HTTPS certificates should already have that public key for you, so it should be trivial.

Yes I agree names only would have been a better approach here.

> The reality is that bug bounty hunters are deploying a significant percentage of the total malicious NPM packages each month.

I don't actually think that is a bad thing.

The TSA screening at airports would be vastly better if TSA maintained a "red team" that regularly tried smuggling guns (or water bottles or whatever) into airports. The agents would be more attentive if the number of incidents they dealt with was large enough that they could practice more often. The system could improve if it had actual feedback on how accurate and effective it was. And instead of agents overreacting or underreacting they could tune their responses to an appropriate level.

The same applies to supply chain attacks. The REAL ones are rare, dangerous, and performed by experts; having a chance to practice catching them, to assess our detection rates, and to adjust our reactions is healthy.