Module 11 Bug Bounty
The second part of this week’s journal entry was an article review, which discussed bug bounty policies, and how researchers identified and got rid of the bugs in their programs. They do this through the help of ethical hackers, who utilize their penetration testing skills to try and discover these bugs, flaws, and weaknesses that might be discovered and used to steal data or information. The main takeaways from this article were the discovery of how effective these bug bounty policies are, how it effects both big time businesses as well as small time businesses, and lastly how the creation of new programs drastically affect how many bugs are created and found, and consequently dealt with. The article concludes with an explanation of how little the researchers knew about these bug bounty markets. This led to the conclusion that “Future research should focus on identifying and measuring more of the variables which determine hacker supply. Subsequent research will elucidate how bug bounty markets work, sharpening our understanding of an increasingly important cybersecurity tool.”