The HackerOne, a leading Bug Bounty Platforms published a survey of top 1,698 Bug Bounty Researchers earns in an average of more than 2.7 times of an average software engineer in their home country.
Bug Bounty Researchers are from every corner of the world and predominantly from India, the United States, Pakistan, India and United Kingdom, 43% of Representatives are from India and United States.
From India (23%) and the United States (20%) are the top two countries represented by the HackerOne hacker community, followed by Russia (6%), Pakistan (4%) and United Kingdom (4%).
Hackerone pulled an equivalent job to the bug bounty earnings of top performers in each country and the average multiplier of the top performers in each of those regions was 2.7x. In India with a multiplier of 16x the median salary of a local software engineer. This means hunting bugs is potentially 16x more lucrative than an alternative job as a software engineer.
Over 90% of bug bounty hackers on HackerOne are beneath the age of 35, with more than half under 25 and just under 8% under the age of 18.Over 66% of hackers spend 20 hours or less every week hacking, with 44% spending 10 hours or less per week. More than 20% of hackers spend over 30 hours for each week.
Also Read Safehats – The Best Alternative Bug Bounty Program for HackerOne and Bugcrowd
Favourite tools – Bug Bounty Researchers
Nearly 30% of hackers on HackerOne use Burp Suite to help them hunt for bugs, and over 15% of hackers build their own tools. Other top tools used for bug hunting include web proxies and scanners (12.6%), network vulnerability scanners (11.8%), fuzzers (9.9%), debuggers (9.7%), WebInspect (5.4%), Fiddler (5.3%) and Chip Whisperer (0.8%), says HackerOne.
Hackers love web apps. Over 70% of surveyed hackers said their favorite types of
product or platform to hack is websites.
Favourite Attack vector
When asked about their favorite attack vector, technique or method, over 28% of hackers surveyed said they prefer searching for XSS vulnerabilities, followed by SQL injection (23.1%), fuzzing (5.5%) and brute force (4.5%), among others, says HackerOne.
They report security vulnerabilities because it’s the right thing to do, Most companies (94% of the Forbes Global 2000 to be exact) do not have a published vulnerability disclosure policy. As a result, nearly 1 in 4 hackers have not reported a vulnerability that they found because the company didn’t have a channel to disclose it.
