Bug-bounty programs have accelerated in the past few years. Many organizations — bewitched by bounty programs' promise of faster vulnerability identification, improved product security, and cost-effective outsourcing solutions — find themselves facing unanticipated vulnerabilities and unexpected threats. What at first appeared as a reliable quick fix to a big problem has instead become a new liability.
With validation requirements growing in complexity and compliance framework audit fatigue on the rise, no one can afford to jump into a bug-bounty program without careful and strategic consideration. Unfortunately, hidden risks abound. Bug-bounty programs:
Are not accredited third-party attestations, nor do they satisfy regulatory compliance requirements.
May quickly identify vulnerabilities but fall short in providing in-depth testing and fail to cover the entire attack surface.
Provide ethical hackers access to source code, which opens the door for adversaries to find vulnerabilities and freely exploit them for nefarious purposes.
One of the most overlooked challenges is that bug-bounty program costs can easily spin out of control. This can happen due to the potentially unlimited number of identified vulnerabilities (paying the bounty), vulnerabilities used for nefarious purposes (compromise of regulated data), remediation of harmless vulnerabilities (wasted development time), and legal judgments (negligence in speed to remediate).
Avoiding PitfallsThe bug bounty is often seen by executive leadership as a silver bullet that efficiently exposes vulnerabilities using an outsourced, pay-as-you-go model. As a result, many programs overemphasize a bounty's value within a comprehensive security strategy. It's too easy for bottom-line decision-makers to approve these programs without informed caution and diligence. There are just too many what-ifs.
Perhaps the most fundamental problem is human nature, which raises several questions. What if one o ..
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