This guest post was written by Umer Awan, the Head of Cyber Security & Emerging Threats @ PureVPN

 

Security is default. There shouldn’t be any other way around it. Being at the helm of a VPN service that’s backed by the trust of more than 3 million users keeps me on the edge. It is my responsibility to guarantee maximum security to my users. So, one of the most pressing things on my to-do list is to ensure my product does what my users want it to do — protect their privacy, security, and anonymity.

As honoring it is to know that PureVPN is used across multiple geographies, multiple platforms, devices and a plethora of protocols, all this variety adds to the complexity of hunting down bugs and fixing them.

This means little reliance on my limited pool of resources or tools to identify vulnerabilities. Fortunately, Bugcrowd’s 90,000+ strong army is there to fight for my users.

It is, hence, a proud moment for me to see PureVPN taking the Bug Bounty program live with full force .


As of now, our services are compatible with and customized for various platforms.


My goal for this program is to work with over 90,000 researchers and ethical hackers across the globe to hunt down any bugs or vulnerabilities, that may potentially harm my family of users.

As an appreciation and to thank the community for helping my users, PureVPN will be giving away rewards ($50 to $1,500). More about the program here.

PureVPN’s partnership with Bugcrowd isn’t new. Our relationship started with a Kudos program, about 3 years back. The program rewarded testers with a note of appreciation to recognize their efforts in helping us identify security vulnerabilities and bugs.

While I still deeply appreciate the crowd’s help, PureVPN needs to better benefit from this massive community. Thus comes the Phase 2, a bigger program for better improvements with bigger rewards.

The reward based program also enables us to scale our security and bug hunting measures further. I mean, regardless of the number of resources we have at PureVPN, with Bugcrowd by our side, that number grows by 90,000+. The math is simple, we are talking about greater speed and the power of the crowd to quickly identify issues, and push us to channel our internal resources to effectively fix the same.

The public program is in its infancy and we already have 200+ testers helping us. We are eager to have more researchers joining from this security research community and helping PureVPN set new benchmarks in the VPN industry.