Hyatt Hotels launches public bug bounty program with HackerOne

Hyatt Hotels Corporation launched its bug bounty program with HackerOne, earlier this week. As part of the bug bounty program, ethical hackers are invited to test Hyatt websites and apps to spot potential vulnerabilities in them. “At Hyatt, protecting guest and customer information is our top priority and launching this program represents an important step that furthers our goal of keeping our guests safe every day,” stated Hyatt Chief Information Security Officer Benjamin Vaughn.

Hyatt Hotels Corporation is headquartered in Chicago and is a leading global hospitality company comprising a portfolio of 14 premier brands. Hyatt’s portfolio includes more than 750 properties in more than 55 countries across six continents. Hyatt decided to choose HackerOne bug bounty program after conducting a deep review of the bug bounty marketplace.

The Bug Bounty program by HackerOne rewards friendly hackers who help discover security vulnerabilities in various important software on the internet. Hyatt is the first in the hotel industry to launch bug bounty program. “By being the first organization in the hospitality industry to embrace the collaborative efforts of global security researchers, Hyatt hopes to continue to raise its already high level of security standards as well as learn from and collaborate with security researchers”, stated the Hyatt team.

The bug bounty program launched by Hyatt with Hackerone was originally available as an invite-only private program where it paid the hackers about $5600 in bounties (bug bounty rewards). This has changed as the bug bounty program is now public. Hackers are allowed to search for vulnerabilities on hyatt.com domain, www.hyatt.com, m.hyatt.com, world.hyatt.com, and on Hyatt’s mobile apps for iOS and Android. The company will be paying hackers $4000 for spotting critical vulnerabilities, and $300 for low severity issues.

The company will be rewarding hackers for tracking vulnerabilities such as novel Origin IP address discovery, authentication bypass, back-end system access via front-end systems, business logic bypass, container escape, SQL Injection, cross-site request forgery, exploitable cross-site scripting, and WAF bypass, among other issues.

“Bug bounty programs are a proven method for advancing an organization’s cybersecurity defenses. In today’s connected society, vulnerabilities will always be present. Organizations like Hyatt are leading the way by taking this essential step to secure the data they are trusted to hold”, said HackerOne CEO Marten Mickos.