Recognizing the rise in open source projects, HackerOne has now decided to expand its Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) program. The extended IBB scope will now cover the security bugs in open-source projects too, awarding lucrative bounties to the researchers.
HackerOne Internet Bug Bounty Covers Open Source Flaws
As announced via a recent press release, HackerOne has planned to expand the scope of its Internet Bug bounty program to include vulnerabilities in open source projects.
Elaborating on this move, HackerOne highlighted the importance of bug fixes in open-source software that many companies frequently rely on. Any vulnerabilities in such programs can potentially affect the entire supply chain, yet, firms couldn’t get them fixed easily earlier. As stated in the press release,
The majority of high risk open source vulnerabilities discovered in 2020 have also existed in code for more than two years and most organizations lack direct control over open source software within supply chains to easily fix these weaknesses.
Nonetheless, HackerOne’s IBB has already played an important role in patching such bugs and rewarding the researchers.
The IBB has already made progress addressing these challenges, with more than 1,000 flaws uncovered in open source projects since its initial launch in 2013, leading to $900,000 in bounties awarded to nearly 300 hackers.
Hence, now, HackerOne steps ahead with a pooled funding model that attracted numerous big firms as partners. Under the new IBB scope, companies can keep their open-source projects secured by pooling a part (1-10%) of their existing HackerOne spend with others. This will encourage both the security researchers and the software maintainers with split bounties (80/20 ratio).
For now, this program has attracted sponsors from Facebook, GitHub, TikTok, Enigma, Shopify, and Elastic – all of which rely on open source.
Besides, under the expanded IBB, HackerOne anticipates fixes for popular open-source projects like Node.js, Ruby, Django, Electron, Curl, and more.
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