What Happened to HackerOne?

sudo_cowsay

All good things don't last forever. A organization or company lasting forever with the same goal/mission while using the same methods is a statistical anomaly.

applfanboysbgon

> Co-founder Michiel Prins was allowed to leave the HackerOne dungeon to perform damage control with this absolute banger of an AI slop response: [...] Wow, it's like he prompted for the most stereotypically AI response possible. There's a tired trope in every sentence going on for four whole paragraphs! I originally quoted it too but thought better and decided to snip it out because I'm pretty sure it would get my account flagged by HN's AI detection algorithm...

abofh

It got the executives it paid for

charcircuit

I'm surprised someone could get upset at AI triaging of bugs which would save everyone time.

paradox460

Sending the sales team on a paid vacation to a tropical paradise while the engineering product flounders is such a perfect representation of corporate rot it sounds like something out of a Mike Judge movie

tptacek

Not only was there significant personal liability, but there had been multiple instances of hackers being criminally charged and sentenced to jail time for finding and reporting security vulnerabilities prior to this. I don't think this is true, although it's a very commonly-held belief. Dan Goodin (I think?) wrote an article about this a long time ago, and was only able to come up with a few examples, and none of them fit this fact pattern. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16642155 What is true is that it is much less legally risky to test someone else's computer than it was 10-15 years ago. People forget that's what you're doing when you look for web vulns! The DOJ has had a norm over the past ~many years not to prosecute good-faith vulnerability research, even though strictly speaking it contravenes CFAA directly. But "risky on paper" is the most you could say about doing that kind of testing back in 2010.

codexon

I reported some exploits on hackerone. Most got dismissed. One of them, a remotely triggerable DoS vector got downgraded in severity. I got a token payment from the company, and 7 years later, it is still not marked as resolved. I doubt my situation is unique.

simpaticoder

I don't understand the controversy at the heart of this post. H1 stated they don't use reports to train LLMs. Then they revealed they were using LLMs to triage reports based on previous reports. These two facts are not necessarily incompatible. It's entirely possible to use an LLM with a db tool installed to triage reports without using the body of the reports as training fodder. The article doesn't give any evidence that this was not the case. It sounds to me more like the OP already disliked H1 (for its sales practices and general enshittification) and the LLM issue was a convenient excuse to make a clean break.

Shank

> To the companies: You don’t need HackerOne anymore. The tokens to build your own in-house platform cost less than single year of HackerOne. You know, the biggest thing that HackerOne delivers is a universal payments system that requires absolutely no efforts from companies. Have you tried to manually pay hackers from around the world? It is a laborious process involving trying to find what providers are compatible and what forms of money go where. It is extremely taxing to handle this. HackerOne provides real, tangible value in not making people think about how precisely to pay a hacker and in what currency. No amount of tokens solve the accounting problem, and it is foolish to imply otherwise.

grogenaut

I'm sorry you don't know the difference between training, fine tuning, and context. But definitions matter especially in legalese.

dualvariable

Bug bounty programs were overrun with low-effort slop nearly a decade before LLMs were introduced; I can't imagine what they're like now...

Sytten

I am in this space. The reality is that the margins for a Bug Bounty Hunting platform are not good, triage is very expensive specially with all the AI slop that gets submitted now. You can hide it for a long time with VC money, but they need to diversify their product line to continue growing and compete against the AI pentest compagnies (which themselves will also diversify as AI pentest becomes a feature and not the whole product).

d0ublespeak

Honestly, you could sub the other big Bug Bounty platform for H1 in this post and you’d be still extremely accurate.

iririririr

From the customer point of view: at a fortune500 I dealt a LOT with h1 (it was never H1) in the early days. Then we got a CISO who was mostly a showman. And at some point (which match the changes in leadership at h1 the article describes) the reports became all garbage and leadership (CISO and CTO) would talk about h1 hackathons with "top hackers flown from all over the world". Such a joke. The end result of those hackatons were 200 "internal host discovery" that were already reported internaly and teams always dismissed as "not worth fixing" and a single attack vector, usually from a brand new acquisition that was still going trhu onboarding. Pretty much never nothing relevant or actionable.

saidnooneever

money happened. it corrupts all. once there is enough of it going around people lose all senses and just want more.

thewhitetulip

I once interviewed there, and it was the weirdest interviews of my life. They literally asked me to prepare on the company mission and values. The first round was about generic stuff where nothing much was asked. And ironically, despite transparency being their core mission, they didn't tell me I was rejected until I emailed them about a week later.

jongjong

Last time I reported a DoS bug to HackerOne, the company behind the bounty tried incite me to commit a crime against them by DoS'ing their servers using the hack I had reported in detail! I literally showed them their server taking over a minute to respond to my request. I even showed how the delay increased proportionally to the message size... Clearly doing more processing; classic DoS vulnerability... Doesn't leave much to the imagination! But they said they would not pay me anything unless I actually proved that it scaled and caused disruption of their service! It seemed like they were baiting me into incriminating myself for a crime that they wanted me to commit against them. It's not even the first time that I've been baited by a software company into committing a crime against themselves. I never took the bait though.

jrozner

I know Joel well and think a lot here is both accurate and well written. I led the Yahoo bug bounty program from 2023-2024 and was involved in it from about 2021. A major event that this glosses over is Covid which also happened right around this time as well. Covid killed travel (and budget) which in turn made it impossible to do the live events. A lot of companies ended up shifting to virtual live events which just never delivered on the same value, scale, or impact. When COVID restrictions were lifted, travel and t&e budgets just never returned. Layoffs started happening and what were lavish, expensive events just couldn’t happen anymore. Hackerone charged for and likely made a lot of money on these events. I think a lot of what is talked about in the article is true but I think Covid is a big part of the why that led to it.

yieldcrv

human slop tl;dr which begins 3,000 words in: employees were noticed to be leaving and it’s because a “fine tuning from user submissions” ai psychosis of yesteryear, except it’s amusingly happening in 2026 still. Investigation into the veracity of the claims.

bullpen

They got corpo touched?