A popular form of crowdsourcing might have a problem with the size of its crowd. Most of the high-value digital security vulnerabilities reported to bug-bounty programs are found by just a fraction of the freelance researchers who participate in those contests, recent reports show, suggesting that there are not enough skilled bounty hunters to handle the available work. The trend has big implications for an industry that has come to expect regular growth over the past half-decade. For the companies, it means their customers — corporations such as Fiat Chrysler, LinkedIn, Starbucks and others — are paying to hear about lots of low-severity bugs while more critical problems potentially remain undiscovered. The latest numbers come from the 2019 Hacker Report by HackerOne, one of the leading bug bounty platforms along with Bugcrowd and Synack. Seventy-two percent of the hackers polled by HackerOne said they preferred to probe for vulnerabilities in websites. Compare that to the 3.5 percent who […]
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