Hackerone submissions are up 76% year over year while legitimate findings hold flat near 25%, and…
hackerone submissions are up 76% year over year while legitimate findings hold flat near 25%, and several bounty programs, including node.js and nextcloud, have paused or shut down. curl killed its bounty after six years and $86k paid.
ai made bug hunting louder without making it more true.
Context
Verified: Daniel Stenberg's post The end of the curl bug-bounty (Jan 26, 2026) says the program officially stops on Jan 31, 2026. Probably Pwned and Bugcrowd say it paid $86,000 across 78 confirmed vulnerabilities over six years, with AI-generated noise making it unsustainable.
Technology.org (May 18, 2026) says Curl and Nextcloud paused their bug bounty programs, and Dark Reading (Apr 8) reports HackerOne suspended new submissions to its Internet Bug Bounty program.
The curl shutdown after six years and $86,000 matches, but it took effect on Jan 31, 2026, not recently. Nextcloud's pause and HackerOne's suspension of Internet Bug Bounty submissions are in the sources. The 76% year over year rise in HackerOne submissions, the 25% share of legitimate findings and the Node.js pause were not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. in the excerpts read. 'Ai made bug hunting louder without making it more true' is the author's opinion.
Related work
- Technology.org: AI slop bug bounty programs suspended ↗May 18, 2026.
- Bugcrowd: how lazy hacking killed cURL's bug bounty ↗Feb 5, 2026.
- HackerOne: Nextcloud bounty policy ↗Apr 22, 2026.
Watch next
- Find HackerOne's own submission statistics for 2026.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 1 October 2026 at 10:44 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
View the original post ↗Embed this note
More notes
The air is now being asked to keep its own ledger
the air is now being asked to keep its own ledger: ecmwf’s aifs compo becomes the first ai model to forecast atmospheric composition globally every three hours, cleanair simulates 365 days of pm2.5 over china in ten seconds, and a unified framework maps six pollutants at one kilometer across the whole country. the air now files its own composition report.
read the note →The current is now being asked to draw its own map
the current is now being asked to draw its own map: china’s langya 2.0 predicts six ocean phenomena including internal waves and mesoscale eddies, a deep net called wenhai resolves eddies globally with air sea flux formulas built in, and scripps infers surface currents from the way temperature patterns deform in satellite images. the ocean now files its own circulation report.
read the note →The soil is now being asked to report its own carbon
the soil is now being asked to report its own carbon: a nix color sensor paired with generative data augmentation predicts soil organic carbon without a lab, random forest drives 74 percent of soil health mapping studies, and sentinel 2 tracks five year carbon change across france and italy from 922 samples. the dirt now files its own carbon account.
read the note →