The down fall of bug bounties
The rise of AI has significantly impacted the bug bounty landscape, leading to an influx of low-quality reports. This shift has caused frustration among skilled researchers, who find their valuable submissions lost in a sea of AI-generated noise. As platforms struggle to adapt, the overall experience for researchers has deteriorated, raising concerns about the future of bug bounties.
- ▪AI has changed the dynamics of security research and bug bounty platforms.
- ▪Skilled researchers are facing challenges due to an increase in low-quality reports from less experienced individuals.
- ▪Platforms like HackerOne and Bugcrowd are attempting to combat the issue with varying strategies.
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The down fall of bug bounties May 18 2026 A few days ago, I was reading a post by Kabir Acharya on how the CTF scene has died as a result of frontier models killing authentic competition. I couldn't really fault his points, but I started thinking about what could actually fix this. We're not going to start installing glorified root-kits (a.k.a anti-cheat) and having supervised e-sports like competitions for CTFs, or are we?I think what Kabir spoke about in his blog is spot on, there's a growing epidemic where AI is changing how we work in the security research space. With any new innovation there's always drastic changes that are both good and bad.
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