Restructuring GitHub's bug bounty program

wxw 28 minutes ago |

> We’re formalizing a permanent private/invite-only VIP program for qualified researchers who consistently deliver high-quality, high-impact work.

> VIP program bounty table:

  Severity  Payout
  --------  --------
  Low       $1,000
  Medium    $7,500
  High      $20,000
  Critical  $30,000+

> We are adjusting our public program rates to accommodate this shift in focus towards quality of relationships and findings over quantity of reports. We are also updating to static payouts—a single, clear number per severity level, rather than a wide range.

> Our new public program bounty table:

  Severity  Payout
  --------  -------
  Low       $250
  Medium    $2,000
  High      $5,000
  Critical  $10,000

> To reduce the volume of low-effort and AI-generated reports, we’re implementing a HackerOne signal requirement on the public program.

darkamaul 19 minutes ago |

I believe the changes here make a lot of sense because, most of the time, your best bugs are not your first ones

Anyone can point an LLM to a code base and ask to find a vulnerability - and the initial set of findings is going to be rather lame.

Encouraging researchers to stick to a target and to report 7 lows before getting in will probably make their contributions more valuable.

dinkelberg 3 hours ago |

So if the "wrong" person finds a critical vulnerability in GitHub, the payout is capped at $10,000. Might reduce the likelihood of it being submitted to the bug bounty program.

toomuchtodo 2 hours ago | |

It might, but as someone who has to review public vulnerability reports for a much less popular website, I completely understand why they’re building a vouch program to dissuade slop reports. One would presume their internal team is using frontier models for red team agent scanning against potential attack surface, and so this is a potential risk they’re willing to take.

Tragedy of the commons that someone who hasn’t passed the filter yet might have their payout limited.

Vouch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930961 - February 2026 (486 comments)

super256 2 hours ago | | |

tbh hackerone should just implement a +/- reputation points feature on researcher profiles. Like, the researcher submits a slop report to GitHub via H1, GitHub looks at it and identifies it as slop, GitHub presses the -rep button on reaearcher profile which bans them from submitting to GitHub on H1 again and makes their rep points minus 1. Companies should be able to configure you need at least 10 rep points to receive payouts. Only specific (by H1 chosen) companies can +/- rep.

So, researchers first need to collect some positive rep. But the rep points are global, so once you have fixed a few bugs for Google, you've gotten enough +rep that you can also receive stuff at GitHub.

Oh, and ID check when signing up at H1.

Long term all beg bounty submitters would be banned for pretty much all of tech.

applfanboysbgon 1 hour ago | | |

How does decreasing pay for humans discourage slop reports, exactly?

dfedbeef 1 hour ago | | |

It discourages all reports, so you get the reduced slop reports for free.

applfanboysbgon 53 minutes ago | | |

Does it, though? It discourages humans from putting in effort because their time will not be rewarded. But the slop reports were not the result of time nor effort. I'd rather expect changing a payout from $1k to $250 doesn't meaningfully move the needle on someone spending two minutes prompting their OpenClaw to spam bug bounties. Especially since the reports you actually want to filter out are the sub-50-IQ reports that were always going to get $0 either way.

Klaster_1 2 hours ago |

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010107

Schnitz 20 minutes ago |

It is much harder to refute bullshit than to make up bullshit. As harsh or unfair as it might seem, this makes sense.

saagarjha 1 hour ago |

I wonder if this incentivizes people to form groups that self-vet for quality submissions to enhance their reputation.

fragmede 1 hour ago |

That's a weird way to do it. Yes, there's a wave of low quality reports, but a vuln is a vuln. The filter mechanism shouldn't affect the payout amount. What if we just give people who are white a higher payout because they are white? That seems fair, right?

jonoc 38 minutes ago | |

I get the joke, but I don’t think GitHub is treating one type of person as inherently more deserving. They’re paying for signal and reduced triage cost as well as the vulnerability itself. AI makes it incredibly cheap to flood them with plausible-looking false positives, while their investigation capacity is finite.

applfanboysbgon 1 hour ago |

I mean, this is just a "fuck you", right? "Because there's a lot of LLM spam, we've decided that some researchers will get 1/4th as much pay for reporting the same bug as others, even if they didn't use LLMs". If anything this will have the opposite of the intended effect -- this strongly discourages humans who aren't part of the VIP program from reporting bugs they find to Github, so you'll probably see a higher ratio of LLM spam in the future. And don't be surprised if those bugs get sold elsewhere...