Security

Critical flaw payouts slashed by more than 75%

Finding vulns just doesn't pay like it used to. At least one bug hunter who found an open source security flaw and reported it months ago via HackerOne’s backlogged Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) program finally got paid for his work - but at a drastically reduced reward rate. 

The security researcher found a medium-severity vulnerability that previously paid $1,843. As of Monday, HackerOne’s IBB pays $297 for the same severity level.

Similarly, the new IBB cash prize for a critical vulnerability is $2,257, compared to the previous $9,250 reward. High-severity bugs now fetch $1,009, while they used to earn a $4,429 payout. And low-severity bugs earn researchers $68, compared to the previous $597 reward.

HackerOne’s IBB remains on a break, and is not accepting new submissions. “The IBB program is currently paused while we evaluate adjustments to the program that will maximize value to researchers, sponsors, and the open-source ecosystem,” a spokesperson told us. “We remain committed to strengthening open source security through ethical security research.”

When asked if AI-generated reports played a role in the pause and reduced reward amounts, a spokesperson didn’t give us a direct answer.

“The Internet Bug Bounty is a unique, dynamic program where bounty levels automatically adjust based on the contributions from active participating sponsors,” the HackerOne spokesperson said. “Payouts under this program are regularly adjusted accordingly, as provided in the IBB program description.”

Tale of two hackers

Back in January, The Register talked with hacker Jakub Ciolek, who told us he reported two denial-of-service bugs in Argo CD, a popular Kubernetes controller, via HackerOne’s IBB program last fall. 

Both were assigned CVEs and fixed. Ciolek expected to receive about $8,500 for the two flaws - but instead HackerOne ghosted him for months, finally sending him an email after The Register reached out to the bug bounty platform. 

HackerOne thanked him for his patience and said his bug reports remain "pending reward processing due to a temporary operational backlog."

Shortly after, we heard from another researcher in a similar situation. “I still hope to get some bounty some day for it,” the bug hunter told The Reg, noting that HackerOne set an end-of-March deadline to sort the backlog.

On Wednesday, this hacker told us he finally received a bounty announcement and payout from HackerOne, although at $297, it was less than expected, as the payout amounts changed after they submitted their report. “I am glad I finally got something,” they said.

Ciolek said he’s still waiting for any word from HackerOne, and told us repeatedly that this isn’t about the money. “The reduced payout is a symptom,” he said. “The economics of vulnerability reporting are changing very quickly.”

Until just a few months ago, project maintainers - and bug hunters themselves, Ciolek included - dismissed this as an AI-slop problem. 

Recently, however, as models have gotten exponentially better at writing code and exploits, open source projects can’t keep up with the pace of bug reports, which still require humans to evaluate them.

"Over the last few months, we have stopped getting AI slop security reports in the curl project,” Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of curl, famously said in a social media post. "They're gone. Instead, we get an ever-increasing amount of really good security reports, almost all done with the help of AI."

Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman also noted in an interview with The Register how AI-assisted bug reports contained less slop and more valid concerns. On Sunday, Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds declared that the project’s security mailing list has become “almost entirely unmanageable” due to multiple researchers using AI to find bugs and then filling the list with duplicate reports.

“The recent Linux security mailing list situation is a clear signal: AI-assisted reports are increasingly real enough to matter, but numerous enough to overwhelm the people who have to validate and fix them,” Ciolek told us.

“Bug bounties were supposed to reward what was scarce,” he continued. “That used to be discovery. Today, finding plausible bugs is becoming much cheaper, and generating reports is easy to scale. The expensive part is still very human: someone has to verify impact, deduplicate reports, decide whether something really crosses a security boundary, coordinate disclosure, and get a safe fix shipped.”

While Ciolek says he’s sympathetic to changing economics, and overworked, underpaid open source project maintainers' capacity to investigate every serious-looking security report, the trust issue between researchers and bug bounty programs remains.

“The trust issue here is that the change was effectively applied long after the work was already done, fixed, and publicly credited under a different expectation,” Ciolek said. “Responsible disclosure depends on researchers believing the process is predictable. The rules should not change after the work is complete. Serious researchers will price that in as risk, or they will stop participating.”

Ciolek says he’s no longer actively doing bug bounty research - but will report serious issues as he finds them.

“With the current flood of findings, I don't want to add more volume unless I'm confident the issue is serious enough,” Ciolek said. “In this AI-assisted era, the valuable work is no longer just ‘I found another bug.’ It is ‘I verified this matters and helped get it fixed.’ I think the original discovery-first bug bounty model is becoming obsolete. The next model has to reward more of the remediation cycle, not only the finding.” ®