Secuur / Services / Bug bounty hunting
07 · Crowdsourced testing

A bug bounty is a triage problem wearing a security costume.

Open a programme and the reports arrive immediately. Most are duplicates. Many are scanner output pasted into a form. A few are excellent. Telling those apart is a specialist job, and it is the reason most self-run programmes are quietly abandoned within a year.

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What it is

Bug bounty hunting.

A bug bounty gives you something no scheduled test can: continuous attention from many independent testers with different instincts, paid only for results. That is genuinely valuable. The cost is a support queue staffed by your senior engineers, arriving unpredictably, in which most tickets are worthless and one is critical.

Secuur runs that queue. We define the scope and safe-harbour terms, receive and validate every report, reproduce what is real, deduplicate against known issues, assign severity, and hand your team a short stream of confirmed findings with working reproduction steps. You keep the upside and stop paying for it in engineering attention.

What you get

Six things this actually does.

01

Programme design

Scope, exclusions, severity-to-payout table and safe-harbour language written so researchers engage and lawyers are comfortable.

02

Report triage

Every submission validated and reproduced by a tester before it reaches your engineers. Invalid reports never arrive.

03

Deduplication

Checked against your known-issue register and prior submissions, so you pay once for a bug rather than nine times.

04

Severity & payout guidance

Consistent, defensible severity ratings with a recommended award, which is what keeps good researchers coming back.

05

Researcher relations

We handle the correspondence — including the disagreements — in your name and to a professional standard.

06

VDP or paid bounty

Start with a disclosure policy and no budget, upgrade to paid bounties when the pipeline justifies it.

The Secuur difference

Scope it before someone else finds it

Cryptographic weaknesses sit in an awkward place for bounty programmes. Researchers report "weak TLS configuration" constantly, most of it is noise from a generic scanner, and triagers learn to close it — which is precisely how a real key-exchange problem gets dismissed alongside the noise.

  • Your cryptographic posture is graded and documented before launch, so the known state is in the register and cannot be re-reported for payout.
  • Triage rules distinguish generic scanner output from genuine key-exchange, certificate and protocol findings.
  • Anything genuinely new in the crypto layer is escalated rather than closed as a duplicate of the standing TLS noise.
How it runs

Three steps, start to evidence.

01

Design

Scope, terms, severity table and payout ranges agreed. We baseline your known issues so duplicates are recognisable from day one.

02

Launch

Private beta with a small invited researcher pool first, then open up once the queue volume is understood.

03

Run

We triage continuously. Your engineers receive confirmed, deduplicated, reproducible findings and nothing else.

Deliverables

What lands in your hands.

  • Programme scope, terms and safe-harbour policy
  • Severity-to-payout matrix
  • Known-issue baseline register
  • Triaged and reproduced findings only
  • Researcher correspondence handled in your name
  • Monthly programme report with spend and trend
Questions

Straight answers.

What is the difference between a VDP and a bug bounty?

A vulnerability disclosure programme gives researchers a safe, legal channel to report issues, with no payment. A bug bounty adds financial rewards, which increases both the volume and the quality of submissions. Most organisations should run a VDP first and add bounties once triage capacity exists.

Does a bounty replace penetration testing?

No. Bounties are unscoped, opportunistic and pay for outcomes, so researchers gravitate to what is quick to find. A penetration test gives you guaranteed coverage of the areas you care about within a defined window. The two find different bugs and work well together.

How much should we budget?

It depends on your attack surface and severity table. We model an expected range during design and start with a private programme so you can observe real volume before committing to an open one.

What if a researcher disagrees with a severity rating?

We handle the correspondence using the published severity matrix as the reference. Having the criteria written down before launch is what turns most of those disputes into a short, factual exchange.

Related services

Often bought together.

Every engagement starts the same way

Know your grade.
Then pick your service.

The scan is free and takes 20 seconds. It also tells us enough to scope bug bounty hunting properly instead of guessing.