Practical Tips For Running A Successful Bug Bounty Program
summary
Claims running hundreds of programs and concrete practices: use a single-page bounty brief with exact scope, exclusions and focus areas; prefer staging over production and provide segregated accounts; pay cash and follow the rule pay when you touch the code; make response times and severity taxonomy predictable; run subdomain enumeration with common researcher tooling like Google Direct recon and aggregation scripts; expect far more findings from a crowd than a one‑off pentest and treat researchers as collaborators so the program improves over time.
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chapters (25)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:35Grant
- 2:05Netscape "Bugs Bounty"
- 2:38An (Abbreviated) History of Bug Bounties Since 1995
- 3:16Do you really want to let people attack you?
- 4:13Who are these people?
- 5:33The Value of Crowdsourced Testing
- 6:19Overview
- 7:01But you never mentioned paying rewards!
- 7:38Touch the code, pay the bug.
- 8:52but first, Step 0
- 10:06Scope
- 13:18Focus
- 14:49Exclusions
- 22:53This is what a shared environment looks like...
- 23:53Access
- 26:24Manage Expectations
- 27:43Communication is Key
- 30:19Coordinated Disclosure
- 31:20Define a Vulnerability Rating Taxonomy (VRT)
- 33:59The Regular Methodologies
- 34:26The Bughunter's Methodology
- 40:29Consider the business impact!
- 41:16Remember what it's all about.
- 42:14Case Study: Instructure
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