Big Investment In Ethical Hacking

Data Breach Today reports that ethical hacking-as-a-service platform Bugcrowd received a $102 million venture capital investment on Feb. 12. The money will be used to develop new services, add features to the platform, and recruit in the hacker community.

Bugcrowd draws on the skills of 500,000 hackers to find and disclose vulnerabilities to its customers, among them T-Mobile, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and OpenAI, which has been a Bugcrowd customer since it launched last January.

Since its inception in 2012, the company has attracted $90 million in investments. Its services include vulnerability disclosure, managing bug bounty programs, and crowdsourced penetration testing.

Threat hunting is among the new services Bugcrowd is developing. Instead of merely disclosing a vulnerability, its penetration testers will describe what they, personally, would be able to do by exploiting the vulnerability. They might also be able to tell whether a vulnerability has already been exploited.

According to its CEO, Bugcrowd signed 200 new clients in its last fiscal year for a total of about 1000 and added 50,000 freelancer hackers to its roster. He said the company has no plans to go public in the immediate future.

According to the terms of the Feb 12 investment, Mark Crane and Paul Sagan of General Catalyst investors will join the Bugcrowd board of directors. Sagan will become the chair.

CSO Jeff Simon of T-Mobile, and Prabhath Karanth, global head of security and trust at Navan, both Bugcrowd customers, will join the advisory board.