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A Visual Guide to Bug Bounty Success

Visual Guide to Bug Bounty Success

While bug bounty success looks different for every program and organization, there are a number of key steps in planning, operating, and evaluating your program that will help ensure you achieve your security goals.

Click the image to download the Visual Guide to Bug Bounty Success

Visual Guide to Bug Bounty Success

START HERE

SETUP

Hone Your Vulnerability Management and Scoring Process

Finetune your vulnerability management process, which scoring system you use, and document how bug bounty reports fit in.

Learn about severity scoring >

Prepare Your Support Team

Your Bug Bounty Leader should determine your on-duty support rotation and sort out your triage team for the most efficient remediation.

Learn about HackerOne triage >

Assess Your Budget

Use bounty benchmarking data to secure the appropriate budget, price bounties effectively, and manage your budget efficiently.

How to set an efficient bug bounty budget >

Communicate Your Response Targets

Set expectations for hackers on your security page for bounty payments by severity, time to triage, time to bounty, and time to remediation. 

Update Your Security Page

The “front door” for hackers to any bug bounty program is the security page. Be transparent about what policies, scopes, and standards hackers should expect from your program. 

See security page best practices >

Champion Internally

Security leaders can showcase the value of a robust bug bounty program by emphasizing the ROI of staying secure in comparison to the cost of a breach.

How customers secure bug bounty buy-in >

OPERATE

Refine Your Scope

As new assets are deployed or updated (e.g. websites, IoT devices, Mobile apps), refine your bug bounty scope for timely and continuous testing based on your industry and security goals.

Get the Right Hackers

Invite the right number and skillsets of hackers to your private program — and call in the HackerOne Triage experts to help with incoming reports. 

How customers get the best hacker results >

Reward Your Hackers

Set your payment scale according to appropriate severity standards, and HackerOne facilitates the entire transaction for bounty payouts.  

How customers get the best hacker results >

Measure Success

Bug bounty success is different for every program and organization, but by setting clear KPIs and sticking to them, you can effectively measure the success of your program and present the ROI to stakeholders.

How customers measure bug bounty ROI >

EVALUATE

Scale Your program

More hackers + more scope + increased bounties = bigger, badder bugs. Work with HackerOne to determine the right time to add more assets into scope or take your private bug bounty program public.

Mercado Libre’s journey to a public program >

Be Creative and Test

Make your bug bounty program exciting for researchers by participating in live hacking events, gamifying vulnerability discoveries, or matching bounty donations to charity. 

How GitHub kept hackers engaged for 10 years of bug bounty >

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