The cost-effective way to shift left: leveraging bug bounty reports to tackle vulnerabilities at source
Security operations rarely generate headlines because of what didn’t happen – breaches averted or critical flaws patched quietly and promptly, for instance.
Whereas successful new products win plaudits and boost revenues, security investments often get filed as a ‘cost of doing business’, much like tax or insurance. And yet these cost keeps climbing as attack surfaces expand, regulations tighten, and adversaries become more capable.
An obvious tension, therefore, arises if those costs also include lost revenues because product development is disrupted by reactive security practices.
The hidden price tag of DevSecOps
Recent industry research has underscored what many teams already suspect: finding and fixing vulnerabilities can potentially slow developers down as release cycles accelerate, even despite productivity gains promised by AI tools.
A 2024 report from market research firm IDC on ‘The Hidden Cost of DevSecOps’ found that organisations were spending more than $28,100 per developer, per year, because of manual reviews, context switching, and other security tasks. Developers were also spending around 19% of their weekly working hours on security-related tasks, which equated to two hours per week longer than the previous year.
The report also found that devs are spending an average of 3.6 hours a week addressing unforeseen security issues outside of normal working hours.
Winning the board’s support
The financial, reputational, and regulatory fallout of cyber-attacks demands a proactive and continuous yet resource-efficient approach to security.
Indeed, pitching for greater security investment in the boardroom is easier if your proposals can credibly reduce rather than increase development friction – by reducing noise, avoiding rework, and slotting seamlessly into established workflows.
Solve the root cause, not just symptoms
Bug bounty programs are known for uncovering issues missed by pentests and scanners. Equally valuable – yet less acknowledged – is their role in prevention. Every high-quality report is a teachable moment that helps developers avoid repeating the same mistakes.
To this end, shrewd organisations turn Bug Bounty reports into training material for developers.
As the saying goes: prevention is better than cure. It’s certainly more cost-effective.
OffSec that scales with development
For vulnerabilities that do ship, bug bounty offers a unified, continuous, and low-friction vehicle for finding and remediating vulnerabilities, where testing is outsourced to a global community of diversely skilled security researchers. A platform-driven model can offer benefits that reduce time-to-fix and the security burden on developers:
- Standardised, actionable reports with clear PoCs, remediation steps, and impact/exploitability summaries accelerate triage and fixes
- Direct access to triagers and hunters enables quick clarifications, so remediation isn’t slowed down
- Risk-based prioritisation keeps teams focused on what truly matters
- Native integrations with tools like Jira or ServiceNow streamline workflows
YesWeHack delivers these benefits to clients in a wide range of sectors and regions, with European customers including Telenor, ATG, Orange, L'Oréal, and TeamViewer. Contact our sales team to book a demo of our crowdsourced security testing and vulnerability management platform. You can also enjoy a demo at the upcoming Cyber Security Nordic event, which takes place between 4-5 November in Helsinki. You can find our team on booth G12. Hope to see you there!
