This absolutely should have happened. "Mature, world-class security teams" are, as a general rule, objectively terrible at creating products that meet any meaningful, objective definition of security.

Remember a few years ago when Apple, the world's most valuable company, released a version of macOS that not only let you log into root with no password(!), but actually helpfully created a root account with the password supplied for the first person who tried to login to root[1]? Zerodium can purchase a vulnerability of similar severity to the one described in the article in Mozilla's premier product, Firefox, which undoubtedly has the best engineers at Mozilla and has had hundreds of millions if not billions spent on its development for $100k [2]. Even if we lowball the consulting rates for a skilled engineer at ~$500k, that means that we should expect a single, skilled engineer to, on average, find such a vulnerability with ~2 months of fulltime work otherwise the supply would have dried up.

By no objective metric does taking 2 months of a single engineer's time to completely defeat the security of a widely used product constitute a meaningful, objective level of security. Even a two order of magnitude underestimation, literally 100x more than needed, still puts it in the range of a small team working for a year which still does not qualify as meaningful security. And, we can verify that this assessment is fairly consistent with the truth because we can ask basically any security professional if they believe a single person or a small team can completely breach their systems and they will invariably be scared shitless by the thought.

The processes employed by the large, public, commercial tech companies that are viewed as leaders in security systemically produce software with security that is not only imperfect, it is not even good; it is terrible and is completely inadequate for any purpose where even just small scale criminal operations can be expected as seen by the rash of modern ransomware. Even the engineers who made these systems openly admit to this state of affairs [3] and many will even claim that it can not be made materially better. If the people making it are saying it is bad as a general rule, you should run away, fast.

To achieve adequate protection against threat actors who actually act against these products would require not mere 100% improvements, it would require 10,000% or even 100,000% improvements in their processes. To give some perspective on that, people who tout Rust say that it if we switch to it we will remove the memory safety defects which are 70% of all security defects. If we use quantity of security defects as a proxy for security (which is an okay proxy to first order), that would require 6 successive switches to technologies each as much better than the last as people who like Rust say Rust is better than C++. That is how far away it all is, the security leaders do not need just a silver bullet, they need a whole silver revolver.

In summary, a vulnerability like this is totally expected and not because they failed to have "world-class security" but because that is what "world-class security" actually means.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/macos...

[2] https://zerodium.com/program.html (ZERODIUM Payouts for Desktops/Servers:Firefox RCE+LPE)

[3] https://xkcd.com/2030/

[4] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...