---
title: "Bug Bounty"
canonical: https://trickest.com/glossary/bug-bounty
description: "A bug bounty program invites external researchers to report security flaws in defined scope and rewards valid, in-scope findings, expanding testing beyond an internal team."
---

# Bug Bounty

A bug bounty program opens an organization's assets to outside researchers and pays for valid security findings. The program publishes a scope (which domains, apps, and APIs are fair game), a set of rules, and a reward structure tied to severity. Researchers test on their own time, submit reports, and earn a bounty when the team confirms the issue is real and in scope.

The model widens coverage. A fixed internal team or a time-boxed engagement can only look at so much, while a public program puts many testers with different skills against the same surface continuously. Programs reward variety: one researcher finds an access-control bug, another finds a server-side flaw nobody else thought to check.

Bug bounty differs from [penetration testing](/glossary/penetration-testing) in structure. A pentest is scoped, scheduled, and paid by time; a bounty is open-ended and paid by result. Both rely on [responsible disclosure](/glossary/responsible-disclosure) so flaws reach the vendor before the public.

Researchers lean heavily on automation for the early stages. In a Trickest workflow, you run continuous [discovery](/glossary/recon) against in-scope targets, surface new endpoints and parameters, and feed candidates to manual testing, where a clean [proof-of-concept](/glossary/proof-of-concept) makes the report easy to validate and reward.

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_Markdown source of https://trickest.com/glossary/bug-bounty._