[mdholloway]

Without defending the researcher here, I thought that was the weakest point in Facebook's response. Was he interacting with Facebook using his synack.com email address during this exchange rather than at some point in the past? Was he signed up on Facebook with his synack.com address? (I haven't used the bug bounty program but it appears to require a user account.) Did he mention his employment with Synack in the course of the exchange? If any of those things were true, I suspect they'd say so, rather than leaving it at "has interacted..."

I don't know, if the guy was just shaking them down then maybe trying to get him fired is indeed a reasonable thing to do, but I don't buy that anyone would have just assumed under the circumstances that he was doing all of this on the clock.