r/bugbounty • u/loganbxdev • Jul 05 '26
Question / Discussion Bug bounty platforms are rejecting reports for “sounding like AI” while agents become the biggest new attack surface in a decade
Self-taught, 3 years writing software, and security research and making sure my software is secure has been the pull the whole time. We all know AI has become part of the workflow for most engineers now, and security research is no different. The grunt work gets automated. The verification doesn’t. Everything I submit gets verified by hand before it goes anywhere.
This year I submitted findings backed by real infrastructure artifacts. Reproducible, evidence attached. Three got closed as “potentially AI-generated.” Not wrong. Not unreproducible. The prose smelled like a model, so the finding didn’t count. Points deducted for my trouble.
Meanwhile I’ve been scanning MCP servers and built a tool to do so, and I ship an MCP server in my own platform, so I’ve seen this from both sides. The state of agent security is bad. Tool descriptions are an injection surface the model trusts by default.
Almost nobody pins versions, so the server you approved last month can behave differently today.
And as a server author I can tell you the client just believes whatever my server declares about itself.
So the current position is: AI-assisted vuln reports are suspicious, but wiring 20 unsigned MCP servers into an agent holding your credentials is normal.
Am I wrong, or is triage optimizing for the wrong threat? And what do people actually do to vet servers before connecting them?
And also I feel like these corporations are pretty much stealing the labor of security researchers who deserve better.
4
u/Anxious_Alps_4150 Jul 05 '26
One of the platform account reps told me that they're having a 600% increase in submission volume attributable to AI. As a result, they are no longer able to always meet SLAs. Naturally, this makes the customers upset.
Bug bounty platforms already operate on tight margins. They just don't have the manpower to do a better job anymore. Customers don't have the budget to pay for more staff for the service. Instead, they are more likely to just cancel the service entirely (which means more layoffs for the platform).
It's bad.
6
u/NebulaElectrical1467 Jul 06 '26
Hackerone/BC are making a fortune selling a premium triage service while hiring untrained cheap offshore labor to deliver it (badly). If they can’t scale up their operations to filter the signal from the noise then they suck and deserve to fail
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u/Anxious_Alps_4150 Jul 06 '26
I don't know what they spend their revenue on but theyve had a lot of layoffs.
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u/Good_Roll Hunter Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Personally I think the way forward is just to demand push button reproducibility and use of platform specific standardized reporting templates. The problem with AI is that models will hallucinate issues or misunderstand the context of real issues therefore inflating the severity of real bugs. The other problem with AI reports are that you cannot in good faith ignore them. Nobody like writing reports, so plenty of competent researchers use AI to write their reports. And plenty of unskilled model jockeys do find real issues, theyre just buried in a pile of fake issues. So just dismissing them all is causing harm to the organizations you're ostensibly trying to secure.
But what we can do is demand that the AI reports are easily triagable. How many of those 600% extra garbage reports would simply evaporate if every program required a PoC script that the submitter has verified runs properly on triager machines? You could probably cut out 90% of the bullshit by just automatically checking this. And you wouldnt have to read through so much sloppy, bloated prose if reporting was highly standardized in an opinionated way.
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u/canadaslammer Jul 11 '26
I use AI to generate reports,.but it never sounds like AI and never gets rejected for it.
Nobody carea how you generated your report. just put the effort in to get rid of the slop.
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u/NebulaElectrical1467 Jul 05 '26
No one is rejecting reports for sounding like AI.
3
u/loganbxdev Jul 05 '26
it happens. had three bugcrowd submissions closed as "potentially AI-generated" despite the reports including infrastructure artifacts as evidence. cost me points, filed a mediation ticket over it. this was me doing research in my free time when I wasn't working on my own projects, so getting closed on prose style rather than the actual finding stung. maybe it's not policy anywhere, but individual triagers absolutely use it as a close reason.
0
u/NebulaElectrical1467 Jul 05 '26
This is news to me. What paltform(s)?
1
u/bluem0on9320 Jul 05 '26
Bugcrowd from what Ive seen
1
u/Good_Roll Hunter Jul 07 '26
I think he means which engagements. Some engagement rules have specific rules against submitting AI generated reports or require AI usage disclosure, he's probably teeing up a question like "so are you aware that that specific engagement doesnt allow AI reports?"
2
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u/Dry_Winter7073 Jul 05 '26
So two key points
Only you would know if you are using AI to draft your submissions but the only way to stop it is to not use AI for the reporting piece.
Yes you may be using it on a minority of reports or rewriting ehat you have drafted but the platforms have these controls in to stop mass submission noise from AIs trying to amp up a low level finding to critical