Yeah, I'm disappointed that the article didn't focus more on that distinction - "send us a snippet from our production database" is not really how responsible programs operate. Compare this story with a similar severity facebook bug:
> That's right, the response contained Facebook's /etc/passwd. Now we were going somewhere. By then I knew I had found the keys to the kingdom. After all, having the ability to read (almost) any file and open arbitrary network connections through the point of view of the Facebook server, and which doesn't go through any kind of proxy was surely something Facebook wanted to avoid at any cost. But I wanted more. I wanted to escalate this to a full Remote Execution.
> A lot of bug bounty programs around the web have a rule that I think is very sensible: whenever you find a bug, don't linger on messing around. Report the bug right away and the security team will consider the worst case scenario and pay accordingly. However, I didn't have much experience with the security team at Facebook and didn't know if they would consider my bug as a Remote Code Execution or not. I Since I didn't want to cause the wrong impressions, I decided I would report the bug right away, ask for permission to try to escalate it to a RCE and then work on it while it was being fixed. I figured that would be ok because most bugs take a long time to be processed, and so I had plenty of time to try to escalate to an RCE while still keeping the nice imaginary white hat I have on my head. So after writing the bug report I decided to go out and have lunch, and the plan was to continue working when I came back.
> That's right, the response contained Facebook's /etc/passwd. Now we were going somewhere. By then I knew I had found the keys to the kingdom. After all, having the ability to read (almost) any file and open arbitrary network connections through the point of view of the Facebook server, and which doesn't go through any kind of proxy was surely something Facebook wanted to avoid at any cost. But I wanted more. I wanted to escalate this to a full Remote Execution.
> A lot of bug bounty programs around the web have a rule that I think is very sensible: whenever you find a bug, don't linger on messing around. Report the bug right away and the security team will consider the worst case scenario and pay accordingly. However, I didn't have much experience with the security team at Facebook and didn't know if they would consider my bug as a Remote Code Execution or not. I Since I didn't want to cause the wrong impressions, I decided I would report the bug right away, ask for permission to try to escalate it to a RCE and then work on it while it was being fixed. I figured that would be ok because most bugs take a long time to be processed, and so I had plenty of time to try to escalate to an RCE while still keeping the nice imaginary white hat I have on my head. So after writing the bug report I decided to go out and have lunch, and the plan was to continue working when I came back.
https://www.ubercomp.com/posts/2014-01-16_facebook_remote_co...
That's the difference between paying a ransom and a bounty.