Indeed, Patchstack is paying bounties for vulnerabilities even if the software vendors have no means to fund it. We finance the bounty program from our core business to give back to the community.

Requirements for Zeroday bounties.

Requirements for the monthly competition.

XP points are calculated by combining parameters like CVSS score, active installation (sales if premium) count, and prerequisite (authentication/authorization) needed to carry out an attack. No points are given if the reported component has less than 1000 active installs (sales if premium) or requires an admin/super-admin role as a prerequisite. However, these reports will still receive a CVE ID for the submitter.

For now, we only support PayPal payments. Patchstack covers all payout (PayPal) fees, so you receive the full amount exactly as promised. However, we are not responsible for other fees such as withdrawal or local taxes. Each researcher is responsible for administrating their local taxes related to the bounty payouts.

Everyone can join Patchstack’s Bug Bounty program as long as they are committed to making the WordPress ecosystem safer. By submitting at least one valid vulnerability report that meets Patchstack’s Bug Bounty program vulnerability report submission requirements, you become a member of Patchstack’s Bug Bounty program.

Patchstack’s Bug Bounty program is an open community of cyber security researchers, developers, pentesters, and bug bounty hunters who research and report security issues in WordPress plugins to win monthly bounties, special competitions, and seasons. Our reporting process and validation triage fast-track security patch creation for vendors, saving you time to do more research.

We already have some of the best WordPress security talents on our dedicated Discord channel, and our community was the world’s largest contributor of open-source vulnerability disclosures in 2023, surpassing even the GitHub community.