Facebook Paid $936,000 In 2015 To Researchers For Reporting Security Loopholes

Yet another tech giant is revealing some bug bounty numbers, and its Facebook this time. The social networking behemoth has announced that it spent a total of $936,000 on paying security researchers in 2015 under its bug bounty program.

The company also stated, that compared to 2014, where it spent $1.3 million, the year 2015 marked a marginal reduction in the pay-out to the researchers, whose job is to find and report security issues to Facebook.

The reduction meant that researchers had difficulty finding out new security threats. 2015’s statistics are better compared to the previous two years and is a positive sign that less threats are being discovered each year.

Lets talk about 2015 numbers in detail.

In 2015 Facebook had to shell out  $936,000 to payout 210 researchers working towards finding security threats that culminated in 526 overall reports for 2015. In 2014, Facebook had paid 321 researchers a sum of, $1.3m for reporting security threats, which is 200,000 less that the $1.5m it paid in 2013.

The figures for 2015 reflect a healthy trend for the company, which paid 300,000 less compared to 2014 even though the rewards for the researchers were increased. Similarly Google has also increased the rewards offered to researchers for finding bugs in the system.

The year 2015 has proved to better for the company which received 13,233 submissions from 5,543 researchers. Compared to 2014, this is a significant reduction as Facebook had received 17,011 submissions, which is the highest for two years. In 2013 the social networking giant had received 14,763 submissions, making 2015 the best year so far.

When it comes to the average pay-out handed over by Facebook, in 2015 it was $1,780, where as in 2014 it stood at $1,788 in 2014. But the pay-out in 2013 was the highest for two years at $2,204.

Among all the researchers who participated in the program, researchers from India emerged as the top receivers of the rewards handed over by Facebook. While Indian researchers topped the pay-out received for 2015, researchers from Egypt, Trinidad, and Tobago managed to out compete the researchers from the UK and US.