Cobalt vs Bug Bounty Providers

While having a bug bounty program is considered best practice as part of a broader offensive security program, the results from these engagements are often unpredictable. As more practitioners start to disregard these low-quality bug submissions – now being termed “AI slop” — the impact of these programs is diminishing. While the pricing model and 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.
• Very few submitted bugs have enough information attached to make a determination about the nature or 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.

In contrast to a bug bounty style engagement, a human-led pentest program from Cobalt focuses on pairing you with expert testers who have experience dealing with your specific applications and technology stack. Instead of hundreds of testers who may only test for one thing, we pair you with a handful of dedicated testers from our highly-vetted community. They use robust methodologies, standardized checklists, and years of experience when checking every nook and cranny of your applications, providing quality, actionable results that won’t get ignored.