A bug bounty program is a crowdsourcing initiative that is offered by a large number of organizations and websites all around the world. In this initiative, individuals are rewarded with recognition and compensation also called bug bounty for reporting critical flaws in software, especially those that can risk security exploits and vulnerabilities.
Bug bounty programs allow developers and white hat hackers to discover and report software vulnerabilities before the general public using the platform is aware of them. This prevents potential exploitation or widespread abuse of the system.
Today, most of the tech giants, including but not limited to Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit, and Square, are implementing bug bounty programs.