Living in the cyber-based world of ours these days, no one can deny the effect of the internet and cyber world on our lives. Nearly 4.5 billion people out of 7.77 are considered active internet users nowadays and around 1.75 billion websites exist on the internet, providing a wide range of content and services. Besides all the great impacts of this web-based platform on our every-day life tough, the dangers and threats in the cyber world are great as well. Cyber-attacks by black hat hackers have risen to be one of the greatest threats to businesses and individuals. According to estimations, cybercrime will cost companies an unbelievable amount of $6 trillion annually by 2021, making cybercrime economy the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history! In 2018, the average cost of cyber-attacks for small and medium businesses was about 3 million dollars in a year and around 400 thousand dollars on a single attack; consequently, leading to 60 percent of targeted small businesses closing their doors within 6 months of being attacked.
Living in this world of cyber theft and considering that every online business has to be facing this army of intruders, the importance of cyber-security rises every day in order to maintain a safe platform for all businesses to exist online. Also, many different types of cybersecurity approaches are available these days for companies to fix their bugs, improve their cyber-defense, and create immunity to any probable issue. One of the most efficient and helpful approaches in this area is Bug Bounty. This brief will provide you with all the information you need about Bug Bounties and help you have a safer business experience online.
What is Bug Bounty?
Bug Bounty programs are referred to deals made by online websites, software developers, and organizations that offer individuals bounties and compensations for evaluating their cyber-defense and reporting any security vulnerability in their network to them. These programs allow business owners and developers to fix these bugs and resolve any issues before being publicized. These programs, also known as vulnerability rewards programs (VRP), are considered as a type of “crowdsourcing” security approaches in threat hunting, providing businesses with a great range of white hat (ethical) hackers to be looking for any kind of security flaws and reporting them to the owner for a previously set reward.
Advantages of bug bounty
Why should we use a Bug Bounty program as our cyber-defense approach? Among all other cyber-defense programs, a Bug Bounty has several notable advantages.
Crowdsourced defense
The first advantage is that with a bug bounty program you have an army of hackers with different specialties from all over the world protecting your website against breaches. This will help with the imbalance of skills that a singular threat hunter specialist may acquire while searching your system comparing to the wide-ranged skills of all the hackers from all over the world trying to breach into a business. After all, it takes an army to defeat an army!
Continuous protection
Bug Bounty provides you with constant 24/7 observance. Attackers won’t take a day off in order to breach into businesses so neither should the security specialists. Also, for websites or software developers who tend to have several updates and changes every month or so, Bug Bounty is a great solution to avoid using a new security scan every time they want to launch a new update.
Cost-effectiveness
Bug Bounty programs can be a relief in your finance department as well. In this type of program, companies will pay the security expert only when a real bug is found and reported -compared to other approaches where you would be charged for a security scan whether or not you get a result.
Public acceptance
Using a Bug Bounty program, you can assure your customers that you will solve any kind of security flaw before it leads to a problem for your business and their information and create a great safe and protected view of your company.
In addition to all said, you can have your team of experts work on other important aspects of your business while the Bug Bounty specialists take care of your cyber-defense. Furthermore, other benefits in using Bug Bounties include the ability to support the most critical attack surfaces such as web and APIs interfaces on server/cloud, mobile and IoT platforms, acceleration of the bug-finding process, and the elimination of overhead and maximization of risk reduction.
Bug Bounty process
Any company willing to use Bug Bounty programs defines the surfaces on which they want their security to be hardened, for instance, a mobile application or web application front ends. Then there are two types of programs that can be used to set bounties for bugs: either you can publish it to the whole community openly (Public program) or you can engage a limited number of specialists (Private/ invite-only program). Also, you can use bug bounties in a time-limited manner, similar to basic penetration tests (Project-based) or a continuous assessment of targets with no time boundaries (continuous).
Bug Bounty hackers will check the system for any kind of security flaw and once found, share it with the provider. Rules in the bug bounty provider platforms state that no bug found should be shared with others or publicized before the provider is informed to protect the providers from any misuse. Thus, the vulnerability can be fixed before any attack or harm occurs to the business.
Widespread use of Bug Bounties
Considering all the benefits of using Bug Bounties in order to achieve a stable cyber defensive state, great attention and interest have recently been gathered around this phenomenon. Many small and medium businesses benefiting from the cost-effective aspect of the Bug Bounty are using it to manage their cyber-defense budget wisely. Aside from that, many giants of the Technology world are now using bug bounties, setting great rewards to get rid of any possible flaw that could lead to bigger problems if not solved.
Many big organizations like Facebook, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, etc. have implemented Bug bounty programs. Mozilla once paid out a $3,000 bounty for bugs in its criteria, while Facebook has even given out a $20,000 for a single bug report. In 2012, Google paid around $700,000 combined for Chrome bugs and Microsoft rewarded bugs found in Windows 8.1 with a $100,000 set of bounties. Bugcrowd, as a major Bug Bounty provider, has claimed some high-profile customers like Tesla, Cisco, Pinterest, and Twillo as well. But it’s not only technology industry companies that have used Bug Bounty as a way to strengthen their security perimeter.
Federal use
In March 2016, the first Bug Bounty program of the US federal government was set by the US Department of Defense as the “Hack the Pentagon” program. Eventually, over 400 people submitted 138 unique valid reports, and $71,200 worth of bounties were paid. This successful experience later led to several other parts of the US Federal government to involve white hat hackers as a part of a vulnerability disclosure framework or policy instead of threatening or fighting them.
The field has had amazing growth in recent years as well. Ethical hackers earned nearly US$40 million in bug bounties only in 2019, almost as much as the earnings of all the previous years combined. Also considering the existing situation of the Covid-19 outbreak and the increase of cyber-attacks due to the widespread use of the internet and online money transfers, the need for bug bounties is higher than ever.
After all, Bug Bounty is one of the most trustable, cost-effective, fast, and reliable cybersecurity approaches used by a huge number of businesses in the world, and considering that it is a new criterion, the field has been growing remarkably the past few years. More than $40 million worth of vulnerabilities were reported only in 2019, equal to all the previous years combined. These approaches are exactly what the world of cyber needs these days in order to create an stronger line of defense against the black hat hackers and reach the final goal of the cyber-security field: a safe platform for all businesses to grow using the internet network without the fear of cyber-crime.
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