Weaponized Disclosure: How Bug Bounty Platforms Became a Reconnaissance Layer for Sophisticated Adversaries
Bug bounty programs were designed to harness the collective intelligence of good-faith researchers. Increasingly, however, sophisticated threat actors are exploiting the structural assumptions baked into coordinated disclosure ecosystems to map defenses, harvest intelligence, and identify exploitable vulnerabilities before patches ever ship. The very openness that makes these programs valuable has become a measurable liability.