It&#x27;s bad enough that the VEP was bypassed, but the high-profile, 7-figure payout for the security researchers who had their hands on the bug is a problem too. Plenty of bug bounty programs have remote code execution at $10k, but the FBI paid _100 times_ that. That&#x27;s an amount of money that some bug hunters might find very challenging to turn down. And this is &quot;above board&quot;, with no shady bitcoin payments from dingy IRC channels.