Facebook’s bug bounty program which debuted in July 2011 is approaching its 10th anniversary, and the social network said around 50,000 researchers have joined the program to date, with 1,500 of them, from 107 countries, being awarded bounties. Security engineering manager Dan Gurfinkel said that when the program began in 2011, its emphasis was on the Facebook web page, and now it covers all of the company’s mobile and web clients across its family of applications, including Oculus and Workplace From Facebook.
The 3 key areas of focus are as follows:
- Generating chances for networking and collaboration at live hacking events and Facebook’s BountyCon conference.
- Formation of tools for the research community to make it simpler and extra rewarding to search for bugs on Facebook.
- Innovating ways to organize and incentivize security research into arising risk areas, such as misuse of Facebook data by app developers or security bugs in websites and third-party apps.
Gurfinkel wrote, “When we receive a valid report that requires a fix, we look not only at the report as it was submitted, but at the underlying area of code to understand the issue in greater depth. Sometimes this proactive investigation leads us to discover related improvements we can make to better protect people’s security and privacy.”
Some highlights of the report are as follows:
- In 2020, Facebook has received some 17,000 reports so far, and it handed out bounties on over 1,000 of them.
- Since the program started in 2011, Facebook has received more than 130,000 reports, of which over 6,900 were rewarded bounties.
- The leading three countries based on bounties awarded this year are India, Tunisia, and the U.S.
- So far in 2020, they’ve awarded over $1.98 million to researchers from over 50 countries.
- For three consecutive years, the company has been rewarding the highest bug bounty payout to date.
