Bug bounty program

A bug bounty program is a deal offered by many websites, organizations and software developers by which individuals can receive recognition and compensation for reporting bugs, especially those pertaining to security exploits and vulnerabilities. These programs allow the developers to discover and resolve bugs before the general public is aware of them, preventing incidents of widespread abuse and data breaches. Bug bounty programs have been implemented by a large number of organizations, including Mozilla, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Reddit, Square, Microsoft, and the Internet bug bounty. Companies outside the technology industry, including traditionally conservative organizations like the United States Department of Defense, have started using bug bounty programs. The Pentagon's use of bug bounty programs is part of a posture shift that has seen several US Government Agencies reverse course from threatening white hat hackers with legal recourse to inviting them to participate as part of a comprehensive vulnerability disclosure framework or policy. Hunter and Ready initiated the first known bug bounty program in 1981 for their Versatile Real-Time Executive operating system. Anyone who found and reported a bug would receive a Volkswagen Beetle ( () Bug) in return. A little over a decade later in 1995, Jarrett Ridlinghafer, a technical support engineer at Netscape Communications Corporation coined the phrase 'Bug Bounty'. Netscape encouraged its employees to push themselves and do whatever it takes to get the job done. Ridlinghafer recognized that Netscape had many product enthusiasts and evangelists, some of which could even be considered fanatical about Netscape's browsers. He started to investigate the phenomenon in more detail and discovered that many of Netscape's enthusiasts were actually software engineers who were fixing the product's bugs on their own and publishing the fixes or workarounds, either in online news forums that had been set up by Netscape's technical support department, or on the unofficial "Netscape U-FAQ" website, which listed all known bugs and features of the browser, as well as instructions regarding workarounds and fixes.