Twitter paid $322,420 to bug hunters

By Yash Kumar Pagare, Youthens on May 29, 2016 at 1:35 PM

Micro-blogging website Twitter has paid $322,420 to researchers and bug hunters who, under its bug bounty “HackerOne” program, have disclosed vulnerabilities in the last two years.

In an increasingly interconnected world, cybersecurity continues to be a critical issue with technology behemoths constantly adopting innovative approaches to beef up their security against malicious cyberattacks, bugs and vulnerabilties.

Launched in May 2014, Twitter’s programme has received 5,171 reports over two years and has paid out a total of $322,420 to researchers, the company revealed in a blog post. A total of 1,662 researchers have received ‘bounties’ through the programme. The minimum payout anyone has got from the company was $140, while the maximum was $12,040. The average payout through the programme is $835.

“We maintain a secure development lifecycle that includes secure development training to everyone that ships code, security review processes, hardened security libraries and robust testing through internal and external services — all to maximise the security we provide to our users,” Arkadiy Tetelman, software engineer at Twitter, said in a blog post on Friday.

Twitter, however, isn’t the only big tech company offering incentives to researchers to motivate individuals and groups of white hat hackers to inform them about possible flaws and vulnerabilities in their networks and digital infrastructure.

In January, Google revealed that it paid out more than $6m since the launch of its own bug bounty programme in 2010. In 2015, the company paid more than 300 security researchers over $2m for finding more than 750 bugs.

Facebook said that it received over 2,400 valid submissions since its launch five years ago and has awarded more than $4.3m to more than 800 researchers. The average payout in 2015 was $1,780 per bug.

The social media giant recently awarded $10,000 to a 10-year Finnish boy who discovered he could infiltrate Facebook-owned Instagram and force delete users’ comments and captions – the youngest hacker to receive a cash reward from Facebook so far.