Bug bounty platform in Spain

A bug bounty programme is an agreement whereby a company authorises external ethical hackers to look for vulnerabilities in its systems and pays them a reward for every valid flaw they report. The company defines which assets are in scope and what is allowed to be done to them; the hacker documents the flaw and only gets paid if the report is validated. Unlike a one-off audit, the programme stays open over time, so security is tested continuously rather than once a year.

The practical difference with a traditional audit is the clock. An audit is a photograph: it describes precisely how your system was on the day it was done. The problem is what happens afterwards. If your team ships every week, every release introduces new surface that the last audit never saw and the next one will not see for months. That gap between audits is exactly where incidents happen.

A bug bounty covers that gap. Because the programme is always open, every change you publish enters the scope the moment it exists. And because there is no small team looking for a week, but many hackers with different specialities looking all year round, the variety of approaches finds things that a single auditor with a fixed methodology does not: someone who has spent years breaking business logic spots a flaw that an infrastructure specialist misses, and the other way round.

The other difference is economic. With a consultancy you pay for the time a team spends looking, whether they find anything or not. With a bug bounty you pay for results: if nobody finds anything, the programme barely costs you. That aligns the incentive, because whoever is looking only gets paid if they bring something real and verifiable.

With Secur0 there is no billing by the hour or by the report: you pay per validated vulnerability, and the reward scales with the severity of the finding. The total cost of a programme depends on two things, the scope of assets you open up and how many real vulnerabilities exist within that scope.

That second part is usually what throws people coming from the consultancy model, so it is worth saying plainly: a programme over a well-built system costs little, because there is little to find. And when the spend goes up it is because flaws have been found that were already there before the programme opened, exposed and with nobody aware of them. Paying for those is not an extra cost: it is the price of finding out before someone else does.

Compare it with what happens in the traditional model. A consultancy charges you for the time its team spends looking, whether they find anything or not. If the audit ends with no relevant findings, the invoice is the same. If the auditor has a bad month, the invoice is the same. The cost is tied to effort, not to results, which means you carry the whole risk.

In a bug bounty programme the incentive works the other way round. Whoever is looking only gets paid if they bring something real, reproducible and validated by our triage team. False positives are not paid. Duplicates are not paid. Noise is not paid. That makes the spend proportional to the value you receive, and lets you justify every euro internally by pointing at a specific vulnerability that no longer exists.

It is the first objection from any security lead, and it is the right one: opening your systems to external hackers sounds like losing control. In practice the opposite happens, because a well-run programme gives you more control over who is testing you than you have today.

You define the scope. Before anything opens, you decide which domains, applications, APIs and infrastructure are in the programme, and which are explicitly out. Also what is allowed to be done to them: what kind of testing, within what limits and under what conditions. Nothing outside that perimeter is touched, and an out-of-scope report is not paid.

You authorise each hacker. Our entire community is verified, and in a private programme you can raise the bar as high as you like: require confirmed identity, country of residence, specific certifications or verified background checks. You authorise access participant by participant and revoke it whenever you want, with no explanation needed.

You decide whether anyone knows. A programme can be public, with the policy visible to anyone, or private and invite-only, with nobody outside knowing it exists. Many teams start private with a small group, check how the report flow works with their own internal process, and only open up afterwards.

Compared with this, the alternative is not “nobody looks”. The alternative is that they look anyway, but with no rules, no channel to warn you and no incentive whatsoever to tell you first.