I'm bothered by people being assaulted just as much as most of the commentators here. Just because I'm not parroting the same "wow Atrient is bad, security researchers good" message doesn't mean my comment is not valid.
Obviously a security researcher that has reported an issue wants to have a healthy dialogue with the company and see that the flaw is patched in a reasonable time frame. But lets not pretend that we have all the facts here. Were they in the middle of an internal investigation? If that investigation showed that there was nobody actively exploiting this issue, doesn't Atrient have the right to patch this vulnerability on their own timeline rather than the researchers?
So they agreed with them about the 60,000 bounty, were waiting for a NDA agreement with the lawyers, but this didn't happen fast enough for them and so they showed up unannounced to an important conference where the company was announcing a new product to question them about it.
Obviously assault is not right at all. But was this really the right way to check on the status of a security fix?
Obviously a security researcher that has reported an issue wants to have a healthy dialogue with the company and see that the flaw is patched in a reasonable time frame. But lets not pretend that we have all the facts here. Were they in the middle of an internal investigation? If that investigation showed that there was nobody actively exploiting this issue, doesn't Atrient have the right to patch this vulnerability on their own timeline rather than the researchers?