Today AT&T is announcing their launch of a new public bug bounty programs on the HackerOne platform. This program will allow security researchers to report security bugs to AT&T in order receive a monetary reward.

Many people associate AT&T as being solely a communications company, when in fact they also own media companies such as WarnerMedia, WarnerMedia Entertainment,  AT&T Latin America, and Xander.  This bug bounty program will now encompass all of “AT&T’s public-facing online environment, including all AT&T-owned websites, public APIs, mobile applications, and devices for potential vulnerabilities and securely disclose them to AT&T”.

This is not the first bug bounty program run by AT&T. Previously they were running a bounty program through their AT&T Developer API Platform.

This program, though, only paid the top 25 researchers on a quarterly basis based on the impact of the reported bugs. With researchers having to meet a certain threshold to earn a bug bounty award and only if their bugs had a certain level of criticality, there was little to incentivize researchers to focus on AT&T bugs.

By transitioning to a HackerOne platform where researchers are paid for every vulnerability that is resolved, they hope to harness the power of a larger community while triaging reports through HackerOne.

AT&T HackerOne bug bounty program

The AT&T bug bounty program was launched privately in July by inviting 100-150 researchers that they worked with in the past on their AT&T Developer API Platform.

Since then the program has received 49 submitted bug reports with a total of $8,150 bug bounties paid. The average bounty paid is currently at $150, with their highest being $750.

Under this program the payouts for reported bugs are:

• Critical – $2,500
• High – $750
• Medium – $300
• Low – $150

AT&T has not shared what types of bugs fit into each classification and have stated that “the criteria used to determine the payout for a vulnerability is solely at the discretion of AT&T.”

HackerOne told BleepingComputer that this “is the first communications company of this size to launch a public bug bounty program of this scale with HackerOne.”

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