GitHub paid out over $500K through its bug bounty program for 203 flaws in 2020

June 29, 2021  By Pierluigi Paganini


Code repository hosting service GitHub announced that it has paid out more than $1.5 million through its bug bounty program since 2016.

Code repository hosting service GitHub announced that it has paid $524,250 through its bug bounty program for 203 vulnerabilities affecting its products and services in 2020. The company revealed that it paid more than $1.5 million since 2016.

“2020 was our busiest year yet. From February 2020 to February 2021, we handled a higher volume of submissions than any previous year. We’re proud that we’ve kept our time to first reply, triage, and payout for submissions within our aggressive standards as the program has grown.” states the Microsoft-owned company.

The company managed 1,066 submissions across its public and private programs.

GitHub proudly claimed that its response times were improved by 4 hours compared to 2019, in 2020 the average was 13 hours to the first response.

The GitHub bug bounty program was ranked as one of the top programs on HackerOne!

According to the company, submissions were validated and triaged internally to partner teams within 24 hours on average and bounties were paid out on average 24 days after the submission of an eligible report.

GitHub announcement also includes technical details about a rare Universal open redirect issue on GitHub.com that was submitted in 2020. The vulnerability was reported by William Bowling, an attacker could have exploited it to log into GitHub Gist for any user by tricking them into clicking a specially crafted link. Bowling was awarded $10,000 for this flaw.

“2021 has seen significant investment and growth across GitHub’s security program. In June, we created a new internal team dedicated to the execution and growth of our bug bounty program,” continues the post. “This team will help further accelerate and refine our triage and response process as well as expand into new initiatives such as live hacking events and additional private bug bounty programs.”

In 2020 GitHub became a CVE Number Authority (CNA) with MITRE and we began issuing CVEs for vulnerabilities in GitHub Enterprise Server.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, CVE)

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Pierluigi Paganini
Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.





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