Bug bounty program

A bug bounty program is a deal offered by many websites and software developers by which individuals can receive recognition and compensation for reporting bugs, especially those pertaining to exploits and vulnerabilities. These programs allow the developers to discover and resolve bugs before the general public is aware of them, preventing incidents of widespread abuse. Bug bounty programs have been implemented by Facebook,Yahoo!,Google,Reddit,Square, and Microsoft.

The original "Bugs Bounty" program was the creation of Jarrett Ridlinghafer while working at Netscape Communications Corporation as a technical support Engineer.

Netscape encouraged its employees to push themselves and do whatever it takes to get the job done and, in late 1995, Jarrett Ridlinghafer was inspired with the idea for, and coined the phrase, 'Bugs Bounty'.

He recognized that Netscape had many enthusiasts and evangelists for their products, some of whom to him seemed even fanatical, particularly for the Mosaic/Netscape/Mozilla browser. He started to investigate the phenomenon in more detail and discovered that many of Netscape's enthusiasts were actually software engineers who were fixing the product's bugs on their own and publishing the fixes or workarounds:

Ridlinghafer thought the company should leverage these resources and sat down and wrote out a proposal for the 'Netscape Bugs Bounty Program', which he presented to his manager who in turn suggested that Ridlinghafer present it at the next company executive team meeting.

At the next executive team meeting, which was attended by James Barksdale, Marc Andreessen and the VPs of every department including product engineering, each member was given a copy of the 'Netscape Bugs Bounty Program' proposal and Ridlinghafer was invited to present his idea to the Netscape Executive Team.

Everyone at the meeting embraced the idea except the VP of Engineering, who did not want it to go forward believing it to be a waste of time and resources. However, the VP of Engineering was overruled and Ridlinghafer was given an initial $50k budget to run with the proposal and the first official 'Bugs Bounty' program was launched in 1995.

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