Facebook on Tuesday announced several new features for its bug bounty program, including an educational resource and payout guidelines.
The payout guidelines provide insight into the process used by the company to determine rewards for certain vulnerability categories. Specifically, it provides information on the maximum bounty for each category and describes the mitigating factors that can result in a lower reward.
Payment guidelines are currently available for page admin vulnerabilities, for which the top bounty is $5,000, server-side request forgery (SSRF), with a maximum reward of $40,000, and bugs in mobile apps, for which the bounty is capped at $45,000.
For example, payouts are lowered depending on whether and how much user interaction is required for exploitation. There are several mitigating factors in each category.
The social media giant also announced the launch of Facebook Bug Bounty Academy, a resource whose goal is to provide information for bug bounty hunters on the best ways to test the company’s services and how to improve their chances of finding valid vulnerabilities.
“Our goal is to provide a launchpad for new researchers beginning to hunt on the Facebook program and explain the specific aspects of this program that make it different from other bug bounty programs,” Facebook said. “The first release of knowledge articles provides advice on how to write reports, avoid common false positives, and a guide on how to set up accounts and test environments.”
Facebook also informed researchers on Tuesday that its Lite apps will also include features designed for vulnerability research, such as the option to disable certificate pinning, fizz support, and network traffic compression.
The social media company announced in November that it had paid out more than $11.7 million in bug bounties since the launch of its program in 2011, including nearly $2 million in 2020.
Related: Facebook Pays $60,000 for Vulnerability in Messenger for Android
Related: Facebook Announces Bug Bounty Loyalty Program, Streamlined Bug Triage
Related: Facebook Paid $2.2 Million in Bug Bounty Rewards in 2019
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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