Oath Pays Over $1 Million in Bug Bounties
24.8.18 securityweek Security

As part of its unified bug bounty program, online publishing giant Oath has paid over $1 million in rewards for verified bugs, the company announced this week.

In April, Oath paid more than $400,000 in bug bounties during a one-day HackerOne event in San Francisco, where 40 white hat hackers were invited to find bugs in the company’s portfolio of brands and online services, including Tumblr, Yahoo, Verizon Digital Media Services and AOL.

The event also represented an opportunity for the company to formally introduce its unified bug bounty program, which brought together the programs that were previously divided across AOL, Yahoo, Tumblr and Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS).

Only two months later, the program had already surpassed $1 million in payouts for verified bugs, the media and tech company says.

“This scale represents a significant decrease in risk and a considerable reduction of our attack surface. Every bug found and closed is a bug that cannot be exploited by our adversaries,” Oath CISO Chris Nims now says.

Nims also points out that, following the feedback received from participants, the company also made a series of changes to their program policy. The company is now willing to hand out rewards for more types of vulnerabilities, although SQLi, RCE and XXE/XMLi flaws are still a priority.

Oath also published the payout table to increase the transparency of the program.

Additionally, the media giant has added EdgeCast to the bug bounty program, by opening the VDMS-EdgeCast-Partners and VDMS-EdgeCast-Customers private programs, which were previously operated separately, to the unified program.

Oath also plans on defining a structured scope for the suite of brands included in the unified bug bounty program. The purpose of this is to “help separate and define bugs for different assets.”

“The security landscape changes constantly, and we hope these updates to the bug bounty program will keep both Paranoids and security researchers alike more adept to detect threats before they cause damage to our community,” Nims concludes.