Our startup is considering moving away from hiring a firm for an ethical hacking audit and instead launching a bug bounty on a platform like HackerOne. Would this provide better coverage since we have "thousands of eyes" on our code, or are there hidden risks to this crowdsourced approach that we should consider?
3 answers
It’s not really an "either-or" situation; the two complement each other. An ethical hacking audit is systematic—the consultant checks every item on a list (like OWASP Top 10) to ensure baseline security. Bug bounties are opportunistic—hackers look for the most clever, high-paying holes. If you only use bug bounties, you might have great defense against complex attacks but still have simple, unpatched vulnerabilities that no one bothered to report because they weren't "exciting" enough. We suggest doing one professional audit a year and running a private bounty program.
How much have you budgeted for the payouts? A successful ethical hacking crowd can drain a small company’s security budget very quickly if you have a lot of "low" and "medium" severity bugs.
Bug bounties also require a lot of internal triage time. You need someone to verify if the reported ethical hacking finding is actually a bug or just a duplicate.
Martha makes a great point. Brenda's hybrid approach sounds like the most balanced way to ensure both breadth and depth in our security strategy.
That’s a valid concern, Philip. We were thinking of starting with a "Vulnerability Disclosure Policy" first, which doesn't pay cash, but offers "hall of fame" recognition. Once we clean up the easy stuff found by that, we might transition into a paid ethical hacking bounty. This way, we don't end up paying thousands for things our internal team could have found with a simple scanner.