COVID-19 has left a great impact on lives and habits of everyone. Business have seen a gradual shift towards the new trend of work from home and organizations moving online. This has made Cyber Security get a boom in the market, because everyone is moving online and cyber threats are increasing a very fast pace. As threats are increasing, the demand for security researchers is also increasing. The Cybersecurity Market was valued at USD 240.27 billion in 2022 and USD 345.38 billion by 2026. Cyber Security is big domain and there are multiple sub-domains in cyber security like:

  • Security & Risk Management
  • Communications & Network Security
  • Security Assessment & Testing
  • Security Operations
  • Software Development Security
  • Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing

In India now people are more interested in Bug Bounties. Bug Bounty is a reward offered to a person who finds vulnerability in an application or software. A student who is learning cyber security, professional who is working in this field already or people from outside of this domain are also doing bug bounties.

Bug Bounties as Career Opportunities:

Nowadays people are earning more than their salary from bug bounties and some people are doing it as their full time job. You just need a laptop or a computer and internet connection and you can earn as much as you want. Organizations are providing a space to security researchers to come on their platform and find security issue and they will pay you.

This help peoples to generate side income to grow there life. Platforms like HackerOne, Bugcrowd and Intigriti helping and supporting security researchers to find the programs to hunt on. There is no time limit to hunt on the programs and no degree or education qualification as such required.

How is has Helps to Organizations:

Any organization can start their bug bounty program. Either they can self-host it or can host on platforms like HackerOne, Bugcrowd, OpenBugBounty, Breachpoint etc. They can set their scope which should be tested by security researchers. This way they get all best hacker’s mind on their program and secure their organization from black hat hackers.

This is also cost-effective, because rather than relying on single security professional, bug bounty program attracts hackers with varying experience to improve security.

The Bug Hunting and its Future Growth:

Well there was a time when hackers were hacking into the companies system and they used to go to jail, but now the hacking is been evolving and hackers are hacking into the system and they are getting paid as a reward for disclosing the vulnerabilities to the organization.

Hacking would always be a decent career for the people that don’t want to follow a sheep mentality corporate career because there will be always be a market for developer and other IT domain but when it comes to hacking general crowd always think hacking as a bad stuff but they won’t be aware of how hacking would save future high profile attacks via bug bounties but moreover users are becoming aware of bughunting and how lucrative it can be.

But usually new emerging hackers are always welcomed by the hacking community and the people who are older in community communicate with the young one and understand their methodology of hacking and reconnaissance.

The Fact that more and more smart things are having internet connectivity and that organization are building AI, ML, Data-science and IOT devices and not still prioritizing security is developing a huge surface and anyone who wants to penetrate into system and secure them is always welcome.

Due to bug-bounty as a professional platform with large attack scope and higher rewards, which leads to improvement on both side from attack perspective as well as company infrastructure perspective.

Security Landscape and Need to Bug Bounty Programs in India:

Security Landscape in India has viewed an extraordinary shift as the rise of digitization has created a potential Cybersecurity vulnerability, particularly as employee continue to spend more time on their devices. A recent report released by PWC, states that about 80% of Indian organization are likely to increase their cybersecurity budget in 2022. With the Rapid acceleration of digital technologies, organization must solve these three keys challenge.

  • Workforce Gap

As Many Companies start considering Cybersecurity as a key business purpose, there is also an essential requirement for them to have a strong team of skilled persons. According to the World Economic Forum, globally, there is a shortfall of 3 million cybersecurity professionals.

Companies running to fill their security recruiting needs may consider changing their focused workers from non-transitional security backgrounds like risk, IT, data analytics, Machine learning or AI expert into security positions. These personal can develop upon the base of their existing role with focused security training.

  • Vulnerability management :

Too many Companies also have a hard time effectively managing their vulnerabilities. This begins with organizations having awareness of what technology they have deployed and are dependent upon to function often via a strong inventory system- and then finding and fixing broken security architecture and other security vulnerabilities in those system punctually.

  • Absence of security integrated tech design:

At the centre of many vulnerabilities are technology systems that were not designed with security in mind. They mostly use insufficient design and development practices. This issue further intensifies as the number of companies developing technology explodes with the digitization of “smart” product lines across every sector – from appliance companies to watchmakers.

Need of Bug Bounties in India:

There is a need of bug bounty programs and bug bounty hunters in India. One of the reasons is there is a small scope investment in technology like using older version of programming language to deploy application which gives rise to many foreign attackers to get critical information about Indian government. There has been various data breaches on many Indian websites in past. Small, Midcap Organizations are not able to sustain a full-fledged security team due to lack of skilled security researchers or budget constraints.

To overcome this, BreachPoint helps to connect these organizations and security researchers with the help of their platform where bug hunters can report security issues and get financial rewards. make sure Indian website or application should be safe and so there are some start-ups which have collaborated with breach-point to make sure their application would be safe before the vulnerability is gone public.

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Breach-Point:

Breachpoint is similar hackerone or bugcrowd but it’s been developed by Indian for Indian applications and websites, organization of any size can run their vulnerability disclosure program on breachpoint.

The benefits of Breach-point includes securing IT infrastructure and assets, Cyber Resilient supply chain management, continuous asset monitoring for any new surprises, robust remediation and Retest processes, Transparent program for eliminating the hidden threat landscape from adversaries.