Crowdsourced bug disclosure programs are popular. The latest evidence is Bugcrowd, which in October alone paid out $1.6 million to some 550 white hat hackers from around the world who collectively reported a total of 6,500 vulnerabilities in products belonging to companies signed up with the platform.
More than $513,000 of those payouts was made just last week—a record in a 7-day period for Bugcrowd since it launched in 2011. The biggest payout of $40,000 went to a hacker who disclosed a bug in an automotive software product.
Over 300 of the 6,500 valid bug submissions to Bugcrowd in October were classified as P1 under Bugcrowd's vulnerability rating taxonomy. These are bugs that are most critical in nature.
Examples include privilege escalation bugs, remote code execution flaws, and bugs that enable financial theft or expose critically sensitive data such as passwords, says David Baker, CSO and vice president of operations at Bugcrowd. "Some recognizable examples of a P1 vulnerability are EternalBlue, BlueKeep, and Apache Struts, the vulnerability that led to the massive breach at Equifax."
Bugcrowd's numbers for October are considerably higher than five years ago, when it paid about $30,000 to 85 hackers. Just five of the bugs reported in October in 2014 were critical.
According to Bugcrowd, bug bounty payouts for 2019 so far is more than 80% higher than last year's payouts, meaning that security researchers are finding and reporting a lot more bugs than ever under the program. "In a matter of a five-year span, we’ve exponentially multiplied payouts, Crowd engagement, and critical findings," Bugcrowd said in a statement Friday. "To say we’re excited is an understatement."
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