07/21/2024

Within the article “Hacking for good: Leveraging HackerOne data to develop an economic model of Bug Bounties,” one could see that there are a multitude of advantages of incorporating bug bounties and utilizing the resources that white hat hackers bring. As many organizations become open to this idea, there are many benefits economically and structurally to cybersecurity policy.

The idea of the bounties is not as far fetched as many would seem to believe. The concept allows for ethical hackers to search for vulnerabilities within an organization’s network and notify them of an issue with potential solutions to fix these problems. With the help of actual ethical hackers, there would not be too much concern since they would report these vulnerabilities, instead of exploiting them for a benefit. However, there are certain risks with this as advertisements for the bounties could be seen by many, and this could cause unethical hackers to potentially gain the information of vulnerabilities being present and use them against the organization.

An organization should use this method if they feel they are benefitting from it economically. However, the risks should always be assessed in order to formulate a secure policy for this. Rewards are great to help insure that many of the vulnerabilities are removed from the system and can definitely help with changing from traditional security methods in order to see how effective the bug bounties really are. Having different sets of eyes on the network to improve security standards is a great method as someone could observe a vulnerability that others may not catch. These factors correlate with other factors though such as program age, time for resolving the vulnerabilities, etc, and could drastically change if the ethical hacking would provide financial benefit or not.

Bug bounties provide a new and unique strategy to fixing vulnerabilities within an organization’s network and should be utilized, but also aired on the side of caution. Depending on the third parties that are used and what the rewards are, there could be a lot of upside to this kind of security measure in the long run as sensitive information would be protected in a better capacity.

References

Sridhar, K., & Ng, M. (2021, March 12). Hacking for good: Leveraging hackerone data to develop an economic model of Bug Bounties. OUP Academic. https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/7/1/tyab007/6168453?login=true