Overview
Bounty Insights transforms historical bug bounty findings into actionable intelligence within the HackerOne Platform. It helps security teams identify patterns in their vulnerability data, track program effectiveness, and plan smarter testing strategies.
Instead of treating each bug as an isolated issue, Bounty Insights reveals systemic weaknesses and recurring attack themes—turning your bounty program into a continuous improvement loop.
Why It Matters
Traditional testing methods often rely on generic checklists that overlook vulnerabilities unique to each environment. Bounty Insights changes that by using real attack data from your own bounty program to drive targeted, data-backed decisions.
This capability helps you:
Understand whether your program is improving over time
Identify systemic or recurring weaknesses
Focus testing where it will have the greatest impact
Demonstrate measurable progress to leadership
Bounty Insights is included in the HackerOne platform at no additional cost.
How It Works
Each Bounty Insights report analyzes your bounty program data to uncover trends, patterns, and correlations. It generates tailored recommendations that help you strengthen future testing and remediation efforts.
Reports include several analytic dimensions, such as:
Vulnerability Themes: Grouping related findings into meaningful categories
Attack Patterns: Recognizing repeated techniques or affected areas
Systemic Weaknesses: Highlighting recurring vulnerabilities and their potential root causes
You can use these insights to plan targeted offensive testing such as pentests, Challenges, or Spot Checks, ensuring that your testing aligns with real-world data.
Requesting Access
You can request to use Bounty Insights directly from within the HackerOne Platform.
Use one of the following entry points to request access:
Organization Homepage: Click the Bounty Insights widget on the homepage
Organization Settings: Open the Bounty Insights page in your org settings and submit the request from there.
After you submit your request, you’ll receive a platform notification and an email confirming when your insights are available.
Testing Recommendations and Checklists
When a Bounty Insight is run, the system generates up to five distinct recommendations for testing strategies or methodologies. These are based on different analytical focuses:
Coverage Verification: Ensures that existing testing covers all relevant attack surfaces.
Escape Reduction: Aims to reduce the likelihood of vulnerabilities escaping detection.
Hardness Verification: Tests the resilience of systems against known and emerging attack types.
Most Common: Highlights widely observed vulnerabilities or attack patterns.
Most Novel: Identifies unique or newly emerging findings that warrant specialized testing.
If Bounty Insights detects enough supporting data for a recommendation, it automatically generates a testing checklist. The checklist lists specific items for you to review and confirm for verification when the hacker uses that methodology.
You can review the testing items and choose which ones to include. After you save the checklists, they become part of your organization’s pentest checklists. These can be reused in future pentest engagements to help guide pentester workflows. For more details, see the Pentest Overview.
Key Benefits
Identify Repeat Problems Early
Bounty Insights surfaces vulnerabilities that appear repeatedly across reports or assets. This helps uncover process gaps and long-term weaknesses before they become major risks.
Measure Program Effectiveness
You can see whether fixes and strategies are working by tracking vulnerability recurrence and trends over time. The data shows if your program maturity and security posture are improving.
Guide Smarter Testing
Using your real attack data, Bounty Insights helps you scope future testing where it matters most. This maximizes test efficiency and improves ROI from your bounty program.
Demonstrate Strategic Value
Security leaders can use insights and visualized trends to communicate program maturity, progress, and impact to stakeholders.
Use Cases
Track progress: Measure if remediation efforts are reducing recurring vulnerabilities.
Spot systemic risks: Identify whether repeated issues point to code-level, process, or architectural weaknesses.
Prioritize resources: Focus your testing and remediation efforts on the areas of highest ongoing risk.
Benchmark maturity: Use historical data to show how your organization’s security capabilities evolve over time.
Integrating Insights into Testing
Bounty Insights is part of the HackerOne feedback loop.
Findings from your bounty program become structured intelligence, which in turn informs more precise offensive testing.
This creates a continuous cycle:
Discover vulnerabilities through bounties.
Analyze data with Bounty Insights to find patterns.
Plan testing focused on the highest-risk areas.
Fix and validate, feeding new data back into the cycle.
Over time, this process shifts your security program from reactive to predictive.
Accessing Bounty Insights
You can find Bounty Insights in the HackerOne Platform through multiple entry points:
Platform Homepage: Dedicated module showing your latest insights
Recommendation Module: Surface-level view within your existing dashboard
Navigation: Under Organization Settings, open the Bounty Insights tab
In-Platform Banners: Direct links when new analyses are available
Target Audience
Bounty Insights is designed for:
Organizations running multiple bounty programs or recurring pentests
Security teams seeking to operationalize bounty learnings into broader strategy
Program owners looking to demonstrate value and progress to leadership
Next Steps
Review your latest Bounty Insights report in the HackerOne Platform. Use the findings to prioritize your next pentest or spot check, address recurring vulnerabilities, and monitor your program’s long-term impact.