Wait, you just made something up.<p><i>Even the researcher</i> doesn&#x27;t claim that Alex contacted the CEO of Synack because of a dispute over the bounty.<p>Rather, it&#x27;s the other way around: the <i>researcher</i> disputed the bounty, and did so by revealing that he&#x27;d retained AWS credentials from Instagram long after they&#x27;d closed the vulnerability that he used to get them.<p>Alex contacted the CEO of Synack to ensure the credentials weren&#x27;t used, because if they were, Alex couldn&#x27;t be control Facebook&#x27;s response: they&#x27;ve got a bug bounty participant who has essentially &quot;gone rogue&quot; and is exploiting Facebook servers long after they&#x27;ve told him to stop. They need him to stop.