This article examines the concept of bug bounties, a technique companies use to contract hackers to discover bugs and weaknesses in their systems’ infrastructure. This method of beefing up security is beneficial for a company by providing a cheaper alternative for organizations with limited resources. The experiments in this article aimed to measure several variables. A few noteworthy areas of question were as follows:
- A hacker’s elasticity: how price-sensitive are they?
- The overall effectiveness of this tool.
- Does the sector an organization is based in affect the number of reports?
In conclusion, this research finding details that overall data about bug bounties is scarce and emphasizes the need for additional research. They discover that hackers are incredibly price sensitive while measuring their elasticity for the first time within the academic literature, that bug bounties overall are a very effective tool for companies to utilize, and that certain sectors contain more reports than others.