Bug bounty: Facebook paid $1.5M to white hat researchers in 2013

Facebook rewards white hat researchers who find errors and holes in the social network’s code, but don’t exploit them. In a look ahead at Facebook’s bug bounty program in 2014, Security Engineer Collin Greene examined what the program did in 2013.

Last year, Facebook received 14,763 submissions from researchers — a 246 percent increase from 2012. Of those submissions, 687 were valid and eligible to receive a reward. 6 percent of the eligible bugs were categorized as high severity, prompting a median response time from Facebook in about 6 hours.

Facebook paid out $1.5