Hey everybody,

So today at the iSEC Partners security open forum I heard a talk from Zane 
Lackey,
the former security lead for Etsy, concerning the effectiveness of bug bounties.

He made two points:

1) Bug bounties are unlikely to cause harm, especially for Wikipedia, which I 
asked
him about, because the mere popularity of our service means we are already being
scanned, pentested, etc. With a bounty program, there will be incentive for 
people to
report those bugs rather than pastebin them.

2) Even without a monetary reward, which I imagine WMF would not be able to 
supply,
crackers are motivated simply by the “hall of fame”, or being able to be 
recognized for
their efforts.

Therefore, I thought it may be beneficial to take that over to Wikipedia and 
start our own
bug bounty program. Most likely, it would be strictly a hall of fame like 
structure where
people would be recognized for submitting bug reports (maybe we could even use 
the
OpenBadges extension *wink* *wink*). It would help by increasing the number of 
bugs
(both security and non-security) that are found and reported to us.

Any thoughts? (Of course, Chris would have to approve of this program before we 
even
consider it.)

-- 
Tyler Romeo
0xC86B42DF

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