Government CISOs are turning towards innovative crowdsourced security testing solutions like bug bounty programs to better protect their digital assets. In 2017, government adoption of crowdsourced security increased 9x, and crowdsourced security appeared in seven pieces of legislation in a six month period.

Momentum is favoring crowdsourced security testing, however the level of trust, control, management, and success is not universal across the industry. It’s critical for CISOs to think about their objectives alongside the capabilities they have internally so that they can choose the best crowdsourced security testing program for their government organization’s needs.

We have based the analysis in this report on the data we have gathered through thousands of tests over the last few years; including hacker demographics, hacker activity, vulnerabilities found, vulnerabilities not found (but searched for), customer demographics, customer asset data and security of those assets over time.