[anthonyryan1]

As the only developer maintaining a big bounty program. I believe they are all trending downward.

I've recently cut bounties to zero for all but the most severe issues, hoping to refocus the program on rewarding interesting findings instead of the low value reports.

So far it's done nothing to improve the situation, because nobody appears to read the rewards information before emailing. I think reading scope/rewards takes too much time per company for these low value reports.

I think that speaks volumes about how much time goes into the actual discoveries.

Open to suggestions to improve the signal to noise ratio from anyone whose made notable improvements to a bug bounty program.

[Aachen]

Similarly from a hacker's point of view, I also think vulnerability reporting is in a downwards spiral. Particularly the ones organised through a platform like this just aren't reaching the right people. It used to be pgp email to whoever needs to know of it and that worked great. I have no idea if it still would today for you guys, but from my point of view it's the only reliable way to reach a human who cares about the product and not someone whose job it is to refuse bounties. I don't want bounties, I've got a day job as security consultant for that, I'm just reporting what I stumble across. Chocolate and handwritten notes are nice, but primarily I want developers and sysadmins to fix their damn software

[xg15]

Putting on my tinfoil hat, I wonder if some of that slop might be coming from actual black-hat groups or state actors - who have an interest in making it harder to find and close real exploits.

Those people wouldn't care about the bounty, overwhelming the system would be the point.

[Applejinx]

I think those people are busier overwhelming other, bigger systems right now, but it's a fair point. I daresay when you get down to a real salt-the-earth destroy-everything point, open source projects can expect destruction by the same people.

To say nothing of the uses of real exploits: that's salient.