HackerOne

My main use case for HackerOne is bug bounties and getting paid through that platform. Companies like Fastify and Oracle create bug bounties and vulnerability disclosure programs on HackerOne. Ethical hackers test the company's applications, websites, APIs, and systems for security issues. Whenever a vulnerability is found, we can submit it as a report to the platform, and then the company reviews the report. If there is a bug related to that issue, they can fix it and reward the researcher based on the severity of the vulnerability. HackerOne acts as a trusted intermediary.

HackerOne is a platform where bug bounty hunters can come to one place to find opportunities. Whenever a company raises a new web application and wants continuous security testing, they can publish it on HackerOne. HackerOne has testers and workers who are continuously testing for vulnerabilities and reporting those findings. For example, a researcher can find cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in a user comment section.

I have a specific example of how I have used HackerOne in a real situation. I personally used it for finding a bug in one of the applications. In one application, whenever we clicked on the login button three times, we were able to go to the home page. After logging in, if we clicked back three times and then clicked again after logout, we were able to go to the home page again because the session storage was not getting stored properly. I reviewed that and raised a report against that vulnerability for a company known as Adwords.

HackerOne provides a platform for both developers and bounty hunters, as well as companies to publish their applications and get paid through bug bounty programs and vulnerability disclosure programs. HackerOne offers report management, triage, a large research community, severity and risk assessment, workflow integration, analytics and reporting, and many other features. One of the biggest strengths is combining a large community of ethical hackers with a structured platform that helps organizations discover, manage, and remediate security vulnerabilities efficiently.

The community aspect of HackerOne helps me personally and helps organizations because they can leverage a global community of ethical hackers to find vulnerabilities before any attackers do. HackerOne functions as a UAT environment where people can test the application, and after the UAT environment, there is a place where testing can be done by breaking the product. Breaking the product is important to test the product thoroughly. HackerOne can be the solution for that when you want to test your product thoroughly, as sometimes breaking the product is the best testing approach. HackerOne can be integrated into tools such as Jira, Slack, and GitHub to streamline the remediation. It also provides a dashboard and insights into security trends, response time, and program performance, which is very helpful for an organization to get their product tested and to get insights about it.

HackerOne can be improved, and the insights can be a little better. I chose a nine for my rating because it has very great features such as a large research community, workflow integration, analytics and reporting, bug bounty programs, and vulnerability disclosure programs. However, some things can be improved, such as better report deduplication by automatically identifying duplicate vulnerability reports more accurately. In the current era of AI, enhancing AI accuracy and AI-assisted triaging would be beneficial.

More advanced AI capabilities would help prioritize reports, reduce false positives, and speed up the validation. For example, not being able to log in is a very high priority rather than a user not being able to get the current date or current time. In applications, if the user is not able to type something, that is the highest priority, rather than the user typing something, getting the information, but on the last page getting something random. That is not a major bug compared to the other issue. Prioritizing through AI can be a better approach.

I have been using HackerOne for around 3.5 years.

HackerOne is quite stable.

HackerOne's scalability is very strong.

HackerOne's customer support is very great.

I did not use any previous solution before HackerOne, but I have knowledge about Bugcrowd and Intigriti, which are in the European region.

The pricing of HackerOne is good and very great from a pricing perspective. The setup cost is not very much and is very minimal. From a setup cost perspective, the onboarding is relatively straightforward. The organization just needs to define the scope of assets that they need to be tested, configure what workflows they need to be tested, and establish the policies for handling any reports.

I have definitely seen a return on investment because every time our application goes to UAT, it is tested by our sales people. However, sometimes the sales people can disregard something or forget to test something. In those cases, HackerOne platform is very good because it provides a great place to test the applications. I haven't seen any specific ROI metrics, but my general impression is that HackerOne provides strong value by helping organizations find vulnerabilities faster and reduce the higher costs associated with security breaches.

I evaluated a few options such as Bugcrowd and Intigriti before going to HackerOne.

My organization does not use HackerOne as a product, but I personally use HackerOne because I am an ethical hacker who uses it to test different applications and try to find vulnerabilities. The reason I do it is to get more information about the different applications, to learn through that experience, and to find how to identify problems in an application. It increases my knowledge regarding any subject, which is very helpful for me.

HackerOne has helped me learn, and there is one technique that I got to pick up. At one place, I was finding a cross-site script issue. There was an API for an order that was passing in the query parameter as the ID of the customer. The order ID and customer ID were getting passed as the query parameter. Whenever we changed that query parameter and if we had the JSON Web Token for authentication, we were able to get the data of other customers as well. This can be protected if you use some other particular tokens and the payload can be tested properly. I got to know about this problem, which improved my knowledge in back-end writing, especially regarding writing the back-end in APIs. That is one area that I have handled.

Regarding HackerOne's AI capabilities, I think the accuracy is very good. Up until now, I have not used its AI features, but the accuracy appears to be good. I gave HackerOne a rating of nine out of ten based on my overall experience with the platform.