Even forgoing the value arguments, the skill required to identify a vulnerability and develop a provable exploit for it and the time it will take is not free, just to pay a senior security researcher a hourly rate or monthly salary will cost much more.

These kinds ofrewards are better than nothing I suppose, but it is looks like a cheap trick to crowdsource blackbox pen testing.

It could be that companies are cheap, but I bet there's also tension between paying enough to get bugs reported and paying enough to encourage insiders to introduce (or, if they're smarter, find but fail to fix or report) bugs then have them "discovered" by someone outside (for a cut of the cash, naturally). Maybe (probably) these bounties are too low to be anywhere near the tipping point for that so are indefensible as-is, but there surely is a level at which you'd expect to be encouraging bad behavior (proof that such a point exists: imagine a $100m bounty—now, that's plainly on the other side into "too likely to encourage, and be claimed by, fraud").

Most companies this size will have at least couple of peer reviews, so you will need collusion from all of them .

Nothing in the world can protect you from poor hiring .

If the employees truly are corrupt then they would make more money selling the bug in the black market then to a legit bug bounty .

Again it should not be linked to value , I.e. not 100m , it should be linked to effort it will take for a security researcher to find it .

Let’s say it took 3 months for a 0 day , the payout should be in the range of 40-50 k dollars perhaps .

It is still not a good deal for the guy finding it , he is risking months and he may not find anything , however being fairly remunerated for the effort if not the value is the first step companies have to take and it won’t look like a cheap trick.

Again, the smart insider doesn’t have to write the vulnerability, they just have to (with much greater access to code and infra than an outsider) notice it and not say anything (except to the outsider they sell it to). Selling such a vulnerability is a lot easier and safer than other ways of illegally monetizing a “hack”—your biggest risk is that you won’t get paid and will have no recourse, if you don’t get the money up-front, or that you do get paid but then someone else fixes the vulnerability before it can be used (that’s probably the worst likely outcome)

[edit] before it can be used to claim the bounty, that is—part of why this is relatively safe and so fairly tempting if the pot is big enough is that the money looks legitimate without some serious digging, so if some of it goes in a crypto wallet and sits there for a couple years then quietly gets siphoned off and laundered until it becomes fiat in the insider’s pocket, well, that’s probably gonna fly under everyone’s radar.