PRIVATE VS PUBLIC BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM

BugBase - The BugGyaan Blog
3 min readDec 9, 2022

WHAT IS A BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM?

A bug bounty is a monetary award offered to ethical hackers who successfully identify and notify the application’s creator of a vulnerability or issue. Through bug bounty programmes, businesses may use the hacker community to increase the security of their systems continually.

Around the world, hackers look for defects and, in some circumstances, make a living doing it. Bounty programmes provide firms with an advantage over testing that could utilize less experienced security teams to uncover vulnerabilities since they draw a diverse group of hackers with various skill sets and expertise. There are two types of Bug Bounty Programs namely:

· Public

· Private

PRIVATE BUG BOUNTY

Private programmes are those that are not made available to the general audience. This implies that hackers can only access these applications if they are specifically invited to do so. As a private programme, reports also continue to be kept secret.

Every programme starts off being private, and they are all allowed to keep it that way for as long as they choose. Bugbase recognizes that granting access to the general public is deliberate and only suitable for some.

Private bug bounty programmes are run by businesses that invite researchers to take part. This gives you the authority and the structure to find and efficiently repair issues. Researchers are frequently skilled, reputable, and screened security experts.

PUBLIC BUG BOUNTY

Programs become vulnerable to bug reports from the whole hacker community when they are made public. This implies that all hackers now have permission to compromise your programme. A premature entry into a public programme might be a challenging experience due to the massive flood of fresh report submissions and participating hackers.

Programs for public bug bounties are accessible to everybody. This kind could produce the finest outcomes since it draws a sizable and diverse group of ethical hackers or researchers. These researchers have varying levels of expertise, and their backgrounds are not investigated.

Report volumes can increase by up to 5x to 10x, which emphasizes the need of making sure your security team is ready before going live.

Publicizing your bug bounty programme is entirely optional.

There is no correct response regarding your company’s decision to implement a bug bounty, whether to make their program(s) public or private. The organization’s objectives, knowledge of its attack surface, unprotected assets, and other risks that make up its attack resistance gap will all influence the answer.

What is BugBase?

BugBase is a curated marketplace for ethical hackers that helps businesses and startups set up bug bounty programs. It is India’s first consolidated bug bounty platform, which assists organizations in staying safe by providing an all-in-one platform for continuous and comprehensive security testing.

Through BugBase registering and setting up your organisation’s bug bounty program is no less than a breeze. We also provide hackers and security professionals with the platform to directly get connected with organizations that have set up their bug bounty programs and get rewarded for the risks and vulnerabilities they find.

Thank you for being part of our BugFam! Stay up to date on our latest posts and hope you had a great week!

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Cheers,

BugBase Team

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BugBase - The BugGyaan Blog

India’s first consolidated Bug Bounty Platform’s technical blog by Aditya Arun Iyer