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Comment by tptacek

What does it mean to "contract an outsourced CISO" to a researcher who reported through a bug bounty program? What's an "outsourced CISO"?

I think it's unlikely that "CISO" is the word you want to use in your copy.

How are you vetting researchers? I logged in as a researcher, and it looks like it works just like H1 works: there are public bounties, and private ones for which admission is gated by performance on the public bounties.

It is not the case that H1 typically costs six figures; typical costs for a startup on H1, with triage, are low five figures.

We manage bug bounties for several of our clients (we run outsourced security teams for startups). If there's a problem we have with bounties, it's not getting enough submissions from them. Triage can be annoying (I kind of enjoy it), but we do full-scope penetration tests for each of our clients, and it's noteworthy how much more a real pentest finds than a bounty program. There are different incentives, different information available, and different kinds of work result.

(There are things bounties do better, too; bounties are good for finding oddball XSS and CSRF problems, and good at corner-case web hygiene stuff).

How are you attracting talent? I don't really understand the business model. Bounty researchers already have a bunch of platforms they can use if they want to do bounty-type scanning. Why are they using yours?

parent tptacek 8 years ago

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