What is bug hunting?

Bug hunting is all about ethical cybercriminals who, as a hobby or a business, find security issues or bugs in online companies. Major technology giants such as Facebook, Google and Apple have regularized the bug bounty programs in their operations. It is also a very high paying job. Bounty hunters, who are highly paid individuals, are typically called bail reinforcement agents. Bounty hunting can be considered risky if one lacks the training and the information on how it generally goes.

Should every company have a bug bounty program?

Amid rising confidentiality and security fears, bug bounty programs are becoming highly important tools for businesses to crowdsource vulnerability evaluation. Bug bounty programs are thought to be programs established by a business or website that offer hackers to submit information of bugs they discover, mainly those associated with security and vulnerability. These bounty hunters get compensated for the activity in return, although it’s often unclear how big of a bounty an attacker can produce.

Indeed, every company should have a bug bounty program as it allows them to work with cybercriminals and those with expertise in penetration testing or security flaws to determine security faults before it results in a breach that can put a business’s assets or its customers at risk. Simply put, an organization generates an inducement for criminals to use their powers for protection rather than manipulation. Bug bounty programs, which get interlopers to determine susceptibilities, are sure to spur a risk against reward debate. One way to alleviate risk is to have a recognized bug bounty program that gives rise to the expectations that the company has of criminals and the expectations cybercriminals can have of the company.

 

Private bug bounty program vs public program

Private Bug Bounty Programs

These are programs that are not published to the public, which means that criminals can only view them when they are specifically invited to hack on them. The reports of such programs also remain secret, and they continue to stay so as long as possible. It is comprehensible that allowing access to the public is an overt step, which is not meant for everyone. It’s therefore recommended that one get started as private as it prevents one from becoming inundated with report submissions from a number of cyber-attackers.

As private programs restrict the number of criminals invited to the program, report proposals are inadequate, allowing your program to get the hang of getting and triaging susceptibility reports. As your private program becomes more effective in dealing with reports, one can choose to go public if wanted.

Public Bug Bounty Programs

When private programs become public, they open themselves up to report submissions from the whole cybercriminal fraternity, implying that all cybercriminals are authorized to hit your program. Moving into a public program impulsively can be an irresistible experience due to the huge incursion of new report submissions and new attackers taking part. Report sizes can go up to 5 or even 10 times, which underscores the significance of guaranteeing that your security team is ready before going public.

Taking your bug bounty program public is wholly discretionary. If your objective is to open up your program to the public, then some suggested success standards are that you have invited over 100 cyber-attackers or you’ve acquired 10 vulnerability reports.

Top Bug Bounty Platforms

Here are some of the popular bug bounty platforms.

Hackerone

Among the bug bounty programs, Hackerone tops the list as far as accessing cybercriminals, producing your bounty programs, disseminating the information, and assessing the contributions are concerned. There are two methods to use Hackerone: use the platform to gather vulnerability reports and sort them out yourself or allow the specialists at the platform to do triaging, which is a challenging undertaking. Triaging is the procedure of putting together vulnerability reports, confirming them, and interacting with hackers. Majot technpology giants like Google Play, PayPal, GitHub, Starbucks use this platform, therefore Hackerone is for those facing serious bugs in their systems.

Bugcrowd

Bugcrowd offers numerous solutions for security valuations, such as Bug Bounty. The platform provides a SaaS solution that assimilates effortlessly into your current software lifespan and makes it a snap to track a fruitful bug bounty program.

Intigriti

Intigriti is a complete bug bounty platform that links you with white-collar criminals, whether you want to run a private program or a public one. For cybercriminals, there’s sufficient gluts to clutch. Contingent on the organization’s size and industry, bug hunts are an expensive proposition, ranging anywhere between $2,000 to $40,000.

Synack

Synack appears to be one of those market exemptions that disrupt the rot and end up doing something huge. Their security program Hack the Pentagon was the main highpoint, leading to the unearthing of numerous serious flaws. So, if you’re searching not just bug finding but also security supervision and training at the top level, this is the right platform for you.

Cobalt

Cobalt’s crowdsourced application security solution has altered today’s broken pen testing model into a data-centric engine powered by their worldwide talent pool of reliable pen-testers. Their SaaS platform carries actionable fallouts that sanction nimble teams to locate, track, and remediate software susceptibilities.

 

Conclusion

A bug bounty program is a procedure made by a company that allows individuals to exploit possible flaws in their systems. This method of spotting bugs is used to escape the general public identifying the bugs which may lead to a massive exploitation of the flaws in their systems. The idea of such programs may appear to be similar to that of traditional penetration, although the method is just the contrary. Therefore, you would need to be prepared firmly for such programs to get a huge amount of money. It’s also true that not all the organizations open such programs, since they can also encounter some problems pertaining to their security systems and reliability. Hence, Bug Bounty programs are also the security valuation programs of companies and should be achieved successfully.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *