Netflix the American Entertainment company opens the public bug bounty program and the rewards vary between $100 – $15,000 based on the critical level of the vulnerability.
The program launched via bug bounty platform Bugcrowd and it covers all the sources of the Netflix iPhone, Android apps, cloud and the software platforms.
Before launching this public vulnerability program Netflix conducted private bug bounty over the past 5 years.
“Since the launch of our private bug bounty program, we have received 145 valid submissions (out of 275 total) of various criticality levels across the Netflix services”. According to their blog post.
Bug bounty program should be part of every organization’s penetration testing plan. It provides them an opportunity to engage with a worldwide community of diverse ethical talent pool who wants to help your organization to build a secure application in return for rewards and recognition.
Also Read Intel Expands Bug Bounty Program Rewards To $250,000 for Meltdown and Spectre Like Vulnerabilities
Netflix says “Our security engineers also have the autonomy and freedom to make reward decisions quickly based on the reward matrix and bug severity”.
Netflix ask researchers to focus on the following areas
Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), SQL Injection (SQLi), Authentication related issues, Authorization related issues, Data Exposure, Redirection attacks, Remote Code Execution, Business Logic, MSL Protocol, Particularly clever vulnerabilities or unique issues that do not fall into explicit categories, Mobile-specific API vulnerabilities.
Netflix says all the researcher contributions are updated in Security Researcher Hall of Fame list if they are the first one to report the issue.
BugBounty program has proved to more effective than going for traditional penetration services conducted through third-party agencies. Bug Bounty platforms like SafeHats provides various programs that would suit each organization’s risk level.
Bug Bounty program employs crowdsource security researchers will diverse skill set covering a wide of vulnerability scenarios and advanced threats.
According to the recent report, 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.
