The modern alternative to bug bounty programs.

While having a bug bounty program is considered best practice as part of a broader offensive security program, the results are often unpredictable. As more practitioners start to disregard these low-quality bug submissions—now being termed “AI slop”—the impact is diminishing. While the idea of thousands of testers finding issues is appealing, the value of bug bounty programs isn’t meeting expectations.

Some challenges with bug findings:

The vast majority of crowd-submitted bugs to bug bounty companies are not actual vulnerabilities.
Few submitted bugs have enough information attached to make a determination about the severity of the bug.
Only a small handful of professional bug hunters are diligent in providing useful writeups of their bugs.
Proving a bug is a security vulnerability requires proof of exploit, which isn’t always easy to do.
The unpredictability of findings means you can’t predict what to budget for bug bounties.

Feature	Cobalt PTaaS	Bug Bounty
Speed of kicking off an engagement	Yes	Yes
Robust methodologies	Yes	No
Dedicated testers	Yes	No
Tester vetting	Yes	Sometimes
Predictable timelines for findings	Yes	No
High-quality findings	Yes	No
Cost-effective offensive security testing	Yes	Yes
Real-time communication with testers	Yes	No
Know your testing team	Yes	No
Integrated delivery model for findings	Yes	No
Free retesting to validate fixes	Yes	No
Focus on customer experience	Yes	No
Customizable reporting for compliance	Yes	No

Some of the issues that come back are phenomenal, things I’d never think of. We’re talking chained exploits and complex business logic issues that we could never find internally ourselves. The Cobalt pentesters go deep and find vulnerabilities that a real hacker in the wild could exploit.

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Adam Davis

Director of Application Security, Insurity

There is a lot of snake oil out there. We loved that Cobalt was the real thing and actually knew what they were talking about. They were the first pentesting solution that presented us with a clear methodology on AI and LLM applications.

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Mishka McCowan

Chief Information Security Officer, PowerSchool

Cobalt vs bug bounty providers

Outpace threats. Stop guessing.