What is a Bug Bounty Program?

A bug bounty program is a crowdsourced vulnerability discovery model. Organizations invite independent researchers to identify and report security vulnerabilities in exchange for monetary rewards. These programs are typically hosted through public platforms or managed through private engagements and focus on: 

• Web applications 
• APIs and backend systems 
• Mobile applications and services 

Bug bounty programs rely on responsible disclosure and reporting and defined reward structures.

What is Red Teaming?

Red teaming is an objective-based, threat-informed adversary simulation. Unlike bounty programs that focus on isolated bugs, red teaming emulates sophisticated threat actors pursuing strategic objectives, such as data theft or ransomware deployment. 

Red team operations evaluate: 

• The organization’s ability to prevent, detect, and respond to real-world attack scenarios 
• How people, processes, and technologies hold up against stealthy intrusion

Comparison: Red Team vs. Bug Bounty

Strengths and Limitations of Bug Bounty Programs

Bug bounty programs are effective for: 

• Identifying high-impact application vulnerabilities 
• Engaging a wide pool of researchers across skill levels 
• Supplementing internal or third-party web application assessments 

However, limitations include: 

• Inconsistent report quality and researcher expertise 
• No coordination with SOC teams or response validation 
• Difficulty aligning bounty results with business risk 

Security programs must also manage triage overhead, noise from low-impact submissions, and reward spending optimization.

Red Teaming Provides Strategic Context

Red teaming fills the gaps that bug bounties cannot address. It delivers: 

• A full attack narrative showing how an attacker achieved a defined objective 
• Detection and response evaluation across SOC, EDR, SIEM, and IR teams 
• Validation of security architecture, including cloud, identity, network, and endpoint environments 
• Evidence of resilience or exposure for board and executive stakeholders 

Red teaming seeks to achieve operational clarity through finding the ground truth of an organization’s readiness. Organizations use it to pressure test their technical controls as well as their people and processes.

When to Use Red Teaming vs. Bug Bounty

Security leaders deploy bug bounty programs to:

• Crowdsource application vulnerability discovery
• Incentivize external researchers to test production systems
• Continuously test for new exposures on public-facing assets

Red teaming is used to:

• Emulate APT groups, ransomware actors, cybercriminals, or insider threats
• Test security operations and incident response performance
• Validate top-down threat scenarios against business-critical assets

Both approaches contribute to security maturity, but they serve different stages of the offensive security lifecycle.

Integrated Offensive Security Strategy

Mature security programs often use both:

• Web applications are continuously tested by public or private bug bounty participants
• Strategic assets and scenarios are targeted by annual or quarterly red team engagements
• Detection tuning and collaborative analysis are performed through purple teaming

This layered approach allows organizations to uncover isolated bugs, test full attack paths, and strengthen defensive posture through structured feedback loops.

Conclusion

Red teaming and bug bounty programs are not interchangeable. Bug bounties identify vulnerabilities; red teaming validates real-world resilience. Security leaders must align each approach with their organizational goals.

For scenarios that matter most (i.e. ransomware simulation, data theft, privilege escalation), red teaming provides the only reliable method for seeing how real attacks unfold and how well the organization responds.

To learn about Bishop Fox red teaming, check out the following resources:

• Guide: Getting Red Teaming Right: A How-To Guide

• Virtual Sessions:
  • Red Teaming: The Essential Tool for Security Leaders
  • Red Teaming: Is Your Security Program Ready for the Ultimate Test?

• Blog Posts: 
  • Red Teaming: The Ultimate Sanity Check for Security Leaders
• Open-Source Tools: CloudFox and CloudFoxable