Bug Bounty Programs: Trust, Triage, and Continuous Security Testing
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Key Takeaways
- Critical bug bounty findings should immediately trigger incident response workflows because they represent validated exposures.
- McKenzie says bug bounty programs amplify both vulnerability discovery and weaknesses in internal remediation processes.
- At Bugcrowd, researchers and hackers are identity-verified, reputation-scored, and selected based on the organization's own risk tolerance.
- Organizations rely on private bug bounty programs to control researcher access and reduce risk.
- AI-generated low-quality submissions are becoming a major triage burden for AppSec and engineering teams.
Nicholas McKenzie, CIO & CISO at Bugcrowd, shared how organizations approach bug bounty programs, external security researchers, and vulnerability management. Before joining Bugcrowd, he led enterprise cyber, physical security, and fraud operations at National Australia Bank, and also worked at Standard Chartered Bank, J.P. Morgan, and UBS.
McKenzie reflects on both sides of the cybersecurity ecosystem, having worked as a penetration tester and leading security at financial institutions. He explains why CISOs remain cautious about external testing, particularly around legal exposure and operational risk, while also showing how mature bug bounty programs help organizations strengthen resilience.
He highlights the growing challenge of AI-generated low-quality submissions and the importance of actionable vulnerability reporting. The interview also shows how red teaming and penetration testing complement each other within enterprise security strategies, offering practical guidance for CISOs.
Vishwa: What concerns do CISOs typically have while allowing external researchers test their systems? How should they address them?
Nicholas: Look, I've sat on both sides of this table—I've been the tester knocking on customers’ front doors, and I've been the CISO deciding who gets in and under what terms.
The big ones I hear consistently:
- Scope creep—researchers going where they weren't invited.
- Data exposure—what happens if a researcher stumbles across PII or sensitive customer data?
- Legal liability—what if something breaks? And then there's one that doesn't get talked about enough:
- Trusting the Crowd:
- Who are these researchers, actually?
- Are they properly vetted?
- Could someone malicious slip through with malintent?
- This is a fair and legitimate concern, especially in regulated industries like financial services or healthcare, where the bar for third-party access is, rightly, very high.
- Trusting the Crowd:
Here's what I tell CISOs who bring up these points: the Crowd isn't some anonymous, free-for-all band of brigades.
On a properly run platform like Bugcrowd, researchers and hackers are identity-verified, reputation-scored, and ultimately selected based on your organization's own risk tolerance.
You can run a private program with ten hand-picked researchers who have a proven track record and relevant technical specializations.
You can filter by geography, by clearance status, and by skill set. You're not opening the doors to everyone; you're choosing who gets a key and what rooms they can access.
That's a very different conversation than "we're letting random strangers on the internet probe our systems."
Vishwa: From both a CISO and a former tester perspective, what helps build trust between organizations and external researchers?
Nicholas: Trust is built in the margins. It's in how fast you respond. It's whether your response feels human or corporate. It's in whether you actually explain why something is or isn't a valid finding rather than just closing a ticket.
From the CISO side, I tell my team to treat every researcher like a potential customer, because they essentially are. They're spending their own time finding problems in your systems. That deserves respect.
- A quick acknowledgement within 24 hours
- Just a simple 'ACK' that it's being looked at
- A clear timeline for triage or notification that it's been sent for customer review
- And honest communication throughout should be the baseline
From the researcher side, trust flows from clarity and consistency. If the scope is clear, the safe harbor is solid, and payments are fair and on time, researchers come back and will continue to hunt.
- They find bigger things.
- They become invested in your security outcome.
- They will become adept not only in your tech stack and breaking that, but also understand more and more about the business processes that the tech is supporting.
- That's the flywheel you want spinning.
And one more thing: credit and recognition matter. Hackers in particular will often tell you they're not in it for the glory, but trust me, a sincere acknowledgement goes a long way. Hall of fame listings, a genuine thank-you or kudos on socials—these cost you nothing and buy enormous goodwill with a community that has very long memories, in both directions.
Vishwa: With experience in red teaming and penetration testing, how do you see bug bounty complement or differ from those approaches?
Nicholas: Think of it this way.
- A penetration test is a sprint.
- Bug bounty is a marathon.
- A pen test is time-boxed, scoped, and delivered by a team you've hired for a defined engagement.
It's excellent for compliance, for deep testing of a specific system or architecture, and for the kind of narrative reporting that helps you explain risk to the board.
Red teaming goes even further:
- it's adversarial simulation,
- threat-actor intelligence emulation
- full-chain attack paths
It answers the question: ‘Could a specific threat actor own us, and how?’
Bug bounty answers a different question entirely: 'What are we missing continuously, at scale, and from a multitude of perspectives we've never had access to before?’
Where I see CISOs go wrong is treating these as an either/or. They're not. A mature security program uses all three:
- Red team for strategic assurance.
- Pen tests for compliance and point-in-time depth.
- Bug bounty for continuous coverage and the long tail of vulnerabilities that only show up after your product has been live for six months and someone's tried something that nobody has ever anticipated.
Vishwa: When a critical vulnerability is reported through a bug bounty program, how does it get prioritized alongside other risks at the leadership level?
Nicholas: First things first: critical means critical. A P1 bug bounty finding should hit and be tied into a customer’s incident response process, full stop.
Remember, this is a validated, tried and tested exposure on your attack surface that’s come to you. It's not a backlog item or some fluffy theoretical risk you would get from a consultancy.
The moment a P1/ critical comes in, it should trigger your IR playbook, just like any other severity-one event—internal owner assigned, timeline set, leadership comms protocol activated. Make sure you have internal processes ready for this.
Other methods that I’ve seen work in some of the more mature enterprise customers involve cross-charging bug bounty payouts to the lines of business and functions where the exposure is found.
This takes time and senior leadership buy-in to implement, but it certainly “sends waves” and makes the point clear across senior leadership when it is their coffers and budgets that the payouts are coming from.
Vishwa: From a CISO’s perspective, what makes a vulnerability report immediately actionable versus something that slows teams down?
Nicholas: I'll be blunt here—a bad vulnerability report is a tax on your engineering team. Every minute they spend trying to reproduce something poorly documented is a minute they're not fixing it.
An immediately actionable report has a few things in common:
- It tells you exactly what was found, with enough technical specificity to reproduce it without all the guesswork (from the triagers or customers side).
- It includes clear reproduction steps—numbered, sequential, nothing assumed.
- It shows the impact in plain terms padded with screen dumps or videos showing how the researcher obtained their goal.
- Ideally, it suggests a remediation path, even if that path is just a pointer to the relevant framework guidance.
What slows teams down?
- Vague impact statements: "This could allow an attacker to..." without any demonstration that it actually does.
- Missing environment details. Provide reports that are technically correct but also lack any business context, so the dev team can't assess whether this is a weekend emergency or a sprint ticket.
Vishwa: When vulnerability reports start coming in at scale, what becomes the biggest operational challenge for teams?
Nicholas: The industry is seeing a huge influx of low confidence vulnerability submissions created using AI-assisted workflows. These “AI-slop” submissions are a huge point of concern for many organizations.
Here’s the thing. AI is an incredible tool for hackers. Bugcrowd recently surveyed over 2,000 hackers and found that 82% use AI to move faster. It’s an incredible tool to scale offensive security testing. However, it’s never been more important for security researchers to focus on validated findings with clear reproduction steps and a real security impact.
From the organization's perspective, turning away from adversarial testing is not the answer. It’s crucial to invest in providers with strong triage programs to sort the signal from the noise.
Providers who can shoulder the burden of identifying valid vulnerabilities that are business critical keep offensive testing as a key asset in an organization’s security resilience strategy.
Vishwa: How do you discuss the value of bug bounty programs to leadership or the board in terms of actual risk reduction?
Nicholas: The mistake some CISOs make is leading with the vulnerability count. "We received 300 reports, resolved 180 of them."
A board doesn't know what to do with that.
- Is 300 good or bad?
- Are you improving or getting worse?
- What does it mean?
What boards actually understand is operational risk language, business impact before and after, and where you can quantify it in financial terms.
Vishwa: If you were advising a CISO starting a bug bounty program today, what decisions should they get right?
Nicholas:
- Start private, not public (unless you’re 100% confident you have mature and robust internal processes).
- I see organizations launch a public program on day one because they want the marketing value, and then they get overwhelmed by volume before their internal processes are ready.
- Get legal alignedbefore you write a single line of scope. Safe harbour language is not optional.
- If your legal team doesn't understand why a researcher needs protection from prosecution for testing in scope, you need to educate them.
- Right-size your rewards from day one. Nothing damages a program's reputation faster than low-ball payouts on critical findings.
- Research the market, look at comparable programs, and be honest about whether your reward structure says "we value this" or "we're going through the motions."
- Appoint an internal program owner. Not a committee.
Vishwa: How do organizations decide where or whether bug bounty fits within their overall security strategy?
Nicholas: The right frame is to start with your threat model and your attack surface. If you're a SaaS company with:
- a large external-facing application footprint,
- significant API exposure,
- a diverse user base,
- have a vulnerability disclosure program with submissions coming in for some time
- A bug bounty is almost certainly a fit.
The other variable is internal maturity, as I have said before. Bug bounty doesn't work in a vacuum. If you can't triage a report within reasonable internal SLAs, if you don't have a clear path or process from vulnerability to remediation, or if your engineering team has no relationship with the security function, those are prerequisites to fix before you go live.
Bug bounty is an amplifier. It amplifies your ability to find vulnerabilities. It also amplifies any dysfunction in your remediation process. Make sure you're amplifying the right things.
What I'd say to any CISO or security team evaluating it: run the experiment small before you commit big.
A private program with a narrow scope costs you relatively little and tells you a lot:
- about your attack surface,
- about your internal readiness, and
- about whether the model fits your organization's culture and risk appetite.
Vishwa: Looking back at your journey, from penetration testing to leading security at global banks and now Bugcrowd, how has your perspective on work and life evolved along the way?
Nicholas: When I started out as a pen tester, everything was about the technical puzzle. The thrill of finding something nobody else had found.
The craft of it. Growing up in Australia, there's a certain DIY, figure-it-out-yourself culture that I think lends itself naturally to security research—you learn to be resourceful, you don't wait for permission, you back yourself. That mindset carried me a long way.
And I genuinely loved it—that curiosity, that adversarial mindset, it's still in me. You don't lose it. But somewhere along the way.
I started to care less about the individual finding and more about the systemic outcome.
- What happens after I leave the report?
- Does it get fixed?
- Does the organization actually get safer?
- How does all this bubble up?
The banking years were formative in a different way. Operating at that scale—millions of customers, regulatory scrutiny, systemic financial risk—forced me to develop a completely different skill muscle and it was measured in culture changes, teams built, processes, and controls strengthened—ultimately whether the organization is genuinely more resilient than it was when I arrived.
Bugcrowd is where those threads come together. I get to sit at the intersection of the researcher community and a mission that I genuinely believe in: that crowdsourced security makes the internet meaningfully safer.
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