Today's security leaders face a critical choice between structured, contracted penetration testing and continuous, crowdsourced bug bounty programs. Both methods find vulnerabilities, but which approach offers the best strategic assurance and return on investment for long term risk mitigation?
To address this, we draw on the insights of Mathieu Novis, a Senior Penetration Tester with SecureOps. His perspective, born from nearly a decade of specialized experience in Application Security (AppSec), suggests the ultimate value of any testing engagement lies in context. For strategic assurance, understanding the full business impact of a vulnerability requires dedicated human expertise that goes far beyond automated or pay-for-results models.
Choosing a vulnerability testing program requires balancing two distinct needs: continuous discovery and strategic assurance. While bug bounty programs excel at the former, they introduce significant challenges for internal teams. Let’s explore their differences:
Novis notes that crowdsourcing often creates a high volume of low value findings. "The value of a dedicated pentester is less noise. With bug bounties, you have a lot of people begging for money for small vulnerabilities that have no impact. It takes a lot of time to sort everything." This flood of minor alerts can dilute focus and drain resources better spent on remediation.
As a result, this high-volume approach makes bug bounty a poor fit for some organizations. Bug bounty programs are generally more suitable for large organizations with substantial, mature cyber teams.
Furthermore, the cost of an undisciplined program can be massive. If a company that is not cybersecurity mature launches a bug bounty program, it could end up being significantly more expensive due to the sheer volume of submissions requiring triaging and potential payout.
By contrast, a dedicated penetration test provides the time and scope needed to understand the application's core business logic, the full exploitation chain, and the true cost of failure. This context is critical for risk prioritization. Novis explains the outcome: "We have time to understand the impact better. In the end, you get an exact summary describing where the application is lacking." This executive summary guides prioritization across development teams, ensuring resources address the most severe issues first.
This executive summary is designed for a broad audience. While bug bounty reports are addressed primarily to technical teams and focus more on pure technical research, a pentest report has a vital educational purpose. The final report is addressed to everyone, including CISOs, Directors, higher management, and technical teams. Novis described the differences, saying, "In a bug bounty, more time is spent on pure technical research. In a pentest, more time is invested in restitution of what was seen."
This dedicated investment in reporting helps guide prioritization across development teams, ensuring resources address the most severe issues first.
Additional benefits of a contracted pentest include control, clear boundaries, and accountability, which is essential when engaging with highly sensitive internal systems. "You know who is testing you. You know where the tester comes from. That is not the case with bug bounty," explained Novis.
There is an industry misconception that high quality tools or AI can replace human ingenuity. Novis is quick to dismiss this idea. Cybersecurity leaders and non-technical professionals alike can underestimate the time and specialized judgment required for complex testing.
"People sometimes assume we can hack everything in three minutes. This is clearly not the case. It is mostly reading, reading, reading, and trying to understand," he says. The process is less Hollywood and more forensic science.
The core human value is the ability to bypass intended functionality, which requires intuition beyond just pattern matching. Attackers and pentesters operate by seeking the path of least resistance, which is often a logic flaw the developer never considered. Novis describes his internal mindset, "The thought process is always, ‘how can I bypass the way the application or security control is intended to work?’ The goal is really to understand and then think outside the box."
While AI can accelerate research and scanning, Novis asserts it is currently a productivity tool, not a replacement. AI lacks the necessary intuition and ethical judgment for safe, high impact testing. "The main word would be context. I feel that for AI to really understand an application or a network, they would need to see way more data than an experienced pentester. The pentester brings their deep experience which allows them to recognize areas for investigation on a gut level."
The true measure of a vulnerability is not its complexity, but its impact. This is where contextual testing provides a clear view of the risks hiding behind basic flaws.
In one engagement, Novis found an unauthenticated link embedded deep within a customer portal’s JavaScript files. It was likely designed for support team debugging. By simply specifying a customer's phone number, an attacker could access full Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data.
The flaw rapidly escalated beyond a data leak. "I was capable of specifying a phone number and could geolocate the person in real time without authentication or anything. That was pretty bad," Novis recalls. This simple configuration error immediately turned into a serious threat involving real-time location data for every customer.
The client’s reaction validated the preventative value of the test. Novis recalled how a company representative noted the financial implications, "Last time they disclosed a similar issue, they had $90 million in lawyer fees just to defend themselves." This story demonstrates how a single missed configuration can expose an organization to massive, unbudgeted liability.
Looking forward, Novis predicts a critical shift in security focus that will dominate executive risk portfolios: Operational Technology (OT) security.
"Protecting the OT will start to become a priority, because if an attacker ends up in OT, they easily disrupt production lines." Driven by geopolitical tensions and sophisticated cyber warfare, industrial and production systems are critical targets. The historic assumption that perimeter IT controls will protect OT is failing.
The core problem is the architecture of these systems at smaller organizations in the industrial sector, such as manufacturing. Once an attacker breaches the IT boundary, near immediate compromise results when OT networks lack modern segmentation. Novis notes that, "Right now, it is pretty much flat. Once you are in, you can go anywhere.". He expects these organizations will align with their larger and intermediate competitors as well as companies in the energy sector who have invested more in securing their OT environments.
Testing these systems requires a level of caution and control rarely seen in web application testing, due to the high stakes involved. The failure of a control system in OT can result in real world physical damage or widespread outages. Novis recalls one stark warning, "We were conducting a test on an energy provider’s environment, and they told us, ‘If you mess up something, you are going to cut electricity to a whole city. So, please be careful.’" This unquantifiable risk makes the controlled, professional nature of contracted pentesting the only viable model for OT environments.
Cybersecurity leaders should measure the value of security testing by the strategic clarity received, rather than the number of bugs found. Effective defense requires a human led, context-driven approach to identify the most severe risks, especially those stemming from unique business logic and emerging frontiers like OT.
Contact SecureOps to discuss how we can help you strengthen your security maturity and safeguard your environment.