Case Study: Defense Digital Service achieves 100% site availability and blocks millions of attacks during its first bug bounty with Akamai Technologies

Department of Defense Ensures Success of its First Bug Bounty Program by Calling Upon Akamai for Site Uptime and Protection

The Defense Digital Service (DDS) partnered with Defense Media Activity (DMA) to run the Department of Defense’s first bug bounty, “Hack the Pentagon,” aiming to crowdsource vulnerability discovery without risking critical systems. Because DoD sites are high‑visibility targets, DDS needed to invite broad participation while ensuring site availability, thwarting Internet‑based attacks, and managing public communications for hundreds of public‑facing military sites.

Akamai provided professional services and always‑on defenses—Web Application Firewall, Client Reputation, Site Shield, and ION—to protect and scale participating sites. The solution kept Akamai‑protected sites online 100% of the time, served 213 million hits and 10 TB of data, denied over 19.2 million malicious requests, defended against 55 sophisticated attacks (including DNS floods and a DDoS from 250 IPs in 83 countries), and ensured no protected DMA sites were compromised. The program yielded 1,189 vulnerability reports (138 qualifying) from 252 vetted hackers, all issues were remediated, and the effort cost roughly $150k versus an estimated $1M for traditional assessment.

Defense Digital Service

Lisa Wiswell

Digital Security Lead