Private Program is now Closed

Hackers, Researchers, Friends,

The Verizon Media public bug bounty program has gone through many changes since it began in 2013 and we have worked with literally thousands of you since then. Ever since the private program was launched, our long term goal was to eventually deprecate it when all of our assets could be moved into our public program. We continuously shrank this exclusive scope by moving it to our public program leading to today, when we are so happy to announce we are closing down that portion of our program as we move the last few assets into our public program. 

Every piece of our private program scope which can be accessed with self-registration or no-registration is now included in our public bounty program. Check out our policy page to see the latest changes to program scope.

A large portion of this change is attributed to our goal of reducing the barrier to participation. Part of this change is also to align with our brand new Elite Bug Bounty program. We are dividing the year into multiple cycles of similar (but not exactly equal) size and will monitor statistics of researchers who participate in our public program during each cycle. At the end of each cycle, the five (5) highest ranking researchers (calculated exclusively by money earned during that cycle) will be selected to move up into our Elite program for the upcoming cycle. Simultaneously, the ten (10) researchers who are presently in the Elite program will be ranked using the exact same calculation for their contribution to the Elite program and the bottom five (5) researchers will be removed from the Elite program for the following cycle. 

We have hand selected the ten (10) researchers who were invited to the first cycle of the Elite program, but everything beyond this point is in your hands.