Twitter pays nearly $300,000 to developers for bug tracking

Twitter has paid out around $300,000 to developers who reported security vulnerabilities in the two years it’s run its Bug Bounty program. A developer managed to get paid more than $10,000 for a reported bug.

On his blog, Twitter puts apart how the so-called Bug Bounty program fared in its first two years. According to the social networking site, more than 5,000 bugs have been reported by 1,662 security researchers since May 2014. One of these individuals was quite successful last year; he managed to get paid 54,000 dollars, which is about 49,000 euros. The average amount Twitter paid when reporting a bug was just $835.

Twitter is rapidly seeing the amount it pays out to developers; in the past quarter, a total of $80,000 was paid out, compared with about half a year earlier. According to the social networking site, the increase in benefits parallels the increasing number of vulnerabilities found. The company is also offering a minimum amount of $15,000 for vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution, but no such bug has yet been reported.

Many major tech companies have such programs for security researchers. Google and Facebook, among others, spend large amounts of money on people who report vulnerabilities.