In October, Bugcrowd disclosed that around 550 hackers from around the world reported roughly 6,500 vulnerabilities, resulting in a total payout of $1.6 million. The company, which launched in 2011, announced that over $513,000 of the monthly payouts were made last week: breaking a company record of most vulnerabilities reported in a 7-day period. Bug bounty payouts in 2019 have so far been 80% higher than last year’s payouts for Bugcrowd. The rising popularity of bug bounty programs like Bugcrowd, Synack, and HackerOne is mutually beneficial to both white hat hackers and organizations, as these platforms allow organizations that sign up to identify bugs in their software at a lower cost while hackers get paid for finding vulnerabilities.
Compared to October of 2014 when Bugcrowd’s payouts totaled $30,000 and only 5 reported bugs were classified as critical, this past month over 300 of the 6,500 bugs identified were considered to be high-risk vulnerabilities. October’s report brings the total number of vulnerabilities reported by hackers and security researchers to the Bugcrowd platform to over 300,000.
Read More: Bugcrowd Pays Out Over $500K in Bounties in One Week
