2019 Researcher Incentive Programs

We are excited to announce brand new incentive programs to recognize and reward our researcher community – along with some tweaks to existing programs! This year we want to focus on challenging you to achieve new levels of success, and to highlight and celebrate your achievements throughout the upcoming year.

Let’s check out the new programs!

P1 Warriors Program

Finding a valid P1 priority vulnerability is something that we all should celebrate – researchers, Bugcrowd, and Program Owners! Therefore, we are kicking off the P1 Warriors program, which will consist of stacking badges on researcher profiles, quarterly blog callouts, and swag! Here is how the program works:

The next levels of this program will be announced later in the year. Note, this program is not based on the calendar year and starts as of January 1, 2019 but will run continuously to let researchers have the ability to reach new levels (this program is not retroactive).

Bounty Slayers Program

Are you ready for a challenge! Here it is:

If a researcher is able to maintain 10 valid submissions at the qualifying priority levels (P4 – P1) each quarter in 2019 they can earn $2,500! Also, if you feel this is not enough of a challenge, we are offering a Power Up bonus option! Here are the details:

Program Rules:

• The reward amount is tied to the number of quarters you qualify – not the calendar quarters.
  • Example: If you qualify for two quarters then you will get $200 and $300 for a total of $500 for 2019.
• You don’t have to qualify for the Power Up bonus all quarters.
  • Example: If you qualify for the Power Up bonus on the third quarter of qualifying for the program, then you would get $200 (1^st quarter to qualify), $300 (2^nd quarter), and $500 (instead of $400 for 3^rd quarter) for a total of $1,000.
• This program runs from January 1, 2019 – December 31, 2019.
• After each quarter is done, then the following month a program update blog post will be published recognizing qualifying researchers and we will process your reward amount according to the number of quarters you have qualified.

We are very excited to be kicking off this program for 2019 and we can’t wait see this program get rocked!

Now that we gone over the new incentive programs for 2019, we have made some tweaks to two of our existing programs – MVP and Hall of Fame.

Let’s check out what the difference!

MVP Program

As already mention in the Bugcrowd 2018 MVP Researcher Wrap Up blog post, we are making some changes to the MVP program. For 2019, the MVP program qualifying period will be the calendar year: January 1, 2019 – December 31, 2019. Also, the minimum of qualify non-duplicate submissions has increased from 10 to 12, which breaks down to 4 non-duplicate submission per quarter. To recap, here are the program qualifying requirements:

• An average submission acceptance rate of at least 80%
• An average submission priority between 1.0 and 2.99
• A minimum of 12 qualifying non-duplicate submissions for the year (4 non-duplicate submission per quarter)
• No significant enforcement infractions, 6 months prior to the qualification date.

The biggest change to the program is the rewards! For 2019, each quarter a researcher qualifies they will receive a piece of exclusive MVP swag! The swag gets bigger and better with each quarter! So, what are the swag pieces? Let’s check it out:

After each quarter is done, then the following month we will do a blog post program update recognizing qualifying researchers and invite you to order your MVP swag piece according to number of quarters you have qualified.

Hall of Fame Program

Starting with January 2019, we will only be rewarding 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd place winners on the P1 P2 leaderboard. The P1 P2 P3 P4 leaderboard will continue to be available and visible for the community but we will no longer be rewarding for that leaderboard. The reward amounts will not change for the P1 P2 monthly leaderboard winners ($3000 for first place, $2000 for second place, and $1000 for third place).

We are implementing this change to allow us to reallocate funds to invest in the new incentive programs and offer more researchers the opportunity to be rewarded for their work on the platform.

We are super excited for this year and seeing all the amazing work you will do, and we can’t wait to celebrate it! If you have questions, please reach out to support@bugcrowd.com. Thanks, and happy hunting!