bug-bounty
What It Means
A bug bounty is a program where companies pay external security researchers to find and report vulnerabilities in their software, systems, or AI models. Instead of waiting for hackers to exploit weaknesses, organizations proactively invite ethical hackers to test their defenses and get paid for discovering problems.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
For AI systems, bug bounties can uncover critical vulnerabilities like prompt injection attacks, data poisoning, or model manipulation that internal teams might miss. This is especially important as AI systems face unique security challenges that traditional security testing may not catch, and regulatory frameworks increasingly expect proactive security measures for AI deployments.
Real-World Example
OpenAI runs a bug bounty program where security researchers can earn up to $20,000 for finding vulnerabilities in ChatGPT, such as ways to bypass safety filters or extract training data. One researcher might discover a specific prompt sequence that causes the AI to reveal sensitive information, report it through the program, and receive payment while helping OpenAI fix the issue before malicious actors exploit it.
Common Confusion
People often think bug bounties are just about finding simple software bugs, but for AI systems they focus on more complex issues like adversarial attacks, bias exploitation, and training data extraction. It's also commonly misunderstood that bug bounty hunters are the same as malicious hackers, when they're actually ethical security professionals helping strengthen defenses.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare, bug bounty programs help medical device manufacturers, EHR vendors, and healthcare AI companies identify ...
Finance: In finance, bug bounty programs help banks, payment processors, and fintech companies identify vulnerabilities in tradin...
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Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"Reward given to independent security researchers, penetrations testers, and white hat hackers for discovering exploitable software vulnerabilities and sharing this knowledge with the operator of a particular bug-bounty program (BBP). "Source: Kuehn,_Andreas
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