Study Finds Bug Bounty Programs Extremely Cost-Effective

itwbennett writes "U.C. Berkeley researchers have determined that crowdsourcing bug-finding is a far better investment than hiring employees to do the job. Here's the math: Over the last three years, Google has paid $580,000 and Mozilla has paid $570,000 for bugs found in their Chrome and Firefox browsers — and hundreds of vulnerabilities have been fixed. Compare that to the average annual cost of a single North American developer (about $100,000, plus 50% overhead), 'we see that the cost of either of these VRPs (vulnerability reward programs) is comparable to the cost of just one member of the browser security team,' the researchers wrote (PDF). And the crowdsourcing also uncovered more bugs than a single full-time developer could find."

Comments

Re:dilbert

[CastrTroy]

I wonder if anything like this is going on internally. Let's say a developer at Google knows about a problem. He could either fix it, and get his regular pay, or he could tell his friend about the bug, and split the bounty with his friend who "discovered" the bug. Either way the bug gets fixed. And it probably get's fixed faster this way, since it's now an externally known vulnerability.