The Bug Hunter's Guide to Acquiring 0-Days
Description
A four-panel 'trollface' or 'rage comic' meme, a popular format from the early 2010s, depicting a cynical guide to finding software vulnerabilities. Panel 1 shows a frustrated trollface character on a laptop with an Apple logo, captioned '1. Can't find bugs'. Panel 2 shows a smiling trollface wearing a keffiyeh with pyramids in the background, captioned '2. Go to Middle East'. In panel 3, the trollface is now holding a microphone and a press pass, with the text '3. Become reporter'. The final panel displays a smartphone screen with a notification for a PDF file, captioned '4. Get free 0days!!!', alongside the classic 'Problem??' trollface. The meme is a piece of dark, cynical humor aimed at the cybersecurity community. It satirizes the idea that instead of actively hunting for zero-day vulnerabilities, a researcher could simply become a high-value target (like a journalist in a politically sensitive region) and have sophisticated, state-sponsored exploits (like Pegasus) delivered directly to their device, thus 'acquiring' them by becoming a victim
Comments
13Comment deleted
My bug bounty submissions kept getting rejected as 'Not Applicable,' so I just changed my job title on LinkedIn to 'Investigative Journalist' and now the 0-days come to me. It's the ultimate bug bounty honeypot
Who needs a petabyte-scale fuzzing farm when one hot take on Middle-East geopolitics ships a nation-grade iOS 0-day straight to your notifications - state-sponsored continuous integration at its finest
The real zero-day vulnerability was thinking you could find all the bugs before production. At least when you become a 'reporter', the bugs find themselves - they just happen to be the kind that make your CISO wake up in cold sweats
Every bug bounty program has a payout ceiling; apparently the gray market's 'become a journalist' tier has none
When your sprint retrospective reveals the team's bug-fixing strategy involves geographic relocation, career pivots, and weaponizing CVEs instead of actually reading the stack trace - you know you've achieved true enterprise-grade technical debt management
When the bug-bounty pipeline dries up, change your title to 'investigative journalist' and APTs will switch you to a push-based zero-click 0‑day delivery model with built-in repro steps
Can't trace the bug? Swap debugger for flak jacket - same sleuthing, but prod incidents come with fireworks
Can’t find bugs? Becoming a journalist so an APT will isn’t a test plan - zero-days are the only freebies you pay for in incident reports
wtf Comment deleted
It is a joke about Journalists in the middle east getting spyware by state sponsored thread actors which often use 0days. Comment deleted
And about InfoSec. It’s dev meme, at the end of the day Comment deleted
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) Comment deleted
Thx Comment deleted