Intercom, the leading customer messaging platform, has announced a key partnership deal with the pioneer in crowd-sourced security testing – Bugcrowd. The latest partnership is important for marketers challenged by a drop in customer numbers due to bug-related issues. Building on the success of its private program, Intercom launched a public bug bounty program to leverage the full scope of Bugcrowd’s curated crowd of 50,000 cyber security researchers to help implement a secure development lifecycle and protect customer data. The reward program comes less than a year since it scooped $50 million in Series C funding from ten investors that were led by Index Ventures.

“Intercom’s business relies on customer trust. To keep this trust we need to use the best tools available to keep our customers’ data secure,” said Thibault Candebat, Information Security Manager, Intercom. “Our private bug bounty program with Bugcrowd allowed us to tap into the creativity and abilities of hundreds of security researchers to find and report the most complex bugs — the ones vulnerability scanners just can’t uncover. Now we’re expanding our program for access to a bigger pool of researchers to improve our ability to find and fix vulnerabilities.”

To fight the malice of bugs in customer messaging platforms, Intercom announced price money of up to $1,500 per vulnerability identified. The public bug bounty program will issue monetary rewards depending on impact and severity. The program will allow testers to examine Intercom’s main application functionality and their iOS and Android SDKs. Intercom believes that the program is one of the best ways to address and stay on top of the latest cyber security challenges.

“Bug bounty adoption has taken off in the last year as it’s become clear that they are not only an asset to organizations, they are vital to the security of businesses,” said Casey Ellis, CEO and founder of Bugcrowd. “Just as clear is the need for a trusted, experienced partner to ensure the success of these bounty programs. We are thrilled to partner with Intercom to help enable secure communications for their customers.”

Bugcrowd’s engaging platform boasts of thousands of intelligence points connected across organizations. It has a global network of thousands of security researchers who help identify vulnerabilities quickly and allow organizations to remediate issues before the adversaries can take advantage of them. By building this security expertise into the design, support, and management of bug bounty programs, Bugcrowd ensures that organizations at all stages of security maturity realize real value from crowdsourced testing. Bugcrowd’s proprietary vulnerability disclosure platform is deployed by top innovation clients, including Tesla Motors, The Western Union Company, Pinterest, Barracuda Networks and Jet.com.

Intercom, founded in 2011, is a key bridge between marketers and existing communication strategies. In a fast pace B2B ecosystem challenged by strong disruptive technologies, Intercom offers a fully-integrated communication tool for every team – sales, marketing, product and support. Businesses use Intercom to build targeted communication strategies with customers on website, in-app, mobile and email.