US DoD announced the results of the Hack US bug bounty challenge

The US Department of Defense (DoD) shared the results of the Hack US bug bounty program that took place in July.

On July 4, 2022, the US Department of Defense (DoD) and HackerOne started the Hack US, a one-week bug bounty challenge, which is considered part of DoD’s vulnerability disclosure program (VDP).

The challenge was launched Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), Directorate for Digital Services (DDS), DoD Cyber Crime Center (DC3), and HackerOne.

The goal of the initiative is to engage the white hackers in reporting vulnerabilities in the government infrastructure and increase its resilience by fixing them.

Now the US Department of Defense (DoD) shared the results of the Hack US bug bounty challenge,

The DoD paid a total of $75,000 in rewards for submitted vulnerability reports, and $35,000 for bonus awards.

According to the US government agency, 267 ethical hackers participated in the challenge, 139 of them are new to DoD’s VDP.

“In just seven days, Hack U.S. ethical hackers submitted 648 reports, including numerous which would be considered critical had they not been identified and remediated during this bug bounty challenge,” said Melissa Vice, the VDP director. “This bounty challenge shows the extra value we can earn by leveraging their subject matter expertise in an incentivized manner,”

The white hat hackers submitted 648 reports, 349 of them are actionable reports.

Top vulnerabilities reported by the participants are information disclosure, improper access, and generic SQL injection.

“With the identification of vulnerability trends, we can seek out patterns of detection and ultimately create new processes and system checks to ensure we address the root cause and develop further mitigations against malicious actors who might try to exploit our systems,” Vice added.

“We have to make sure we stay two steps ahead of any malicious actor,” Katie Olson Savage, deputy chief digital and artificial intelligence officer and Defense Digital Service director, said in a statement. “This crowd-sourced security approach is a key step to identifying and closing potential gaps in our attack surface.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Hack US)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.