March 13, 2019

Scope Changes

Note: Verizon Media is now known as Yahoo.

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Dedicated Hackers,

Verizon Media is the culmination of over 70 years of internet companies (AOL ‘85, Yahoo ‘94, VDMS ‘06) with products, platforms, and brands coming and going throughout our history. We’ve been getting some questions recently about companies which used to be under our ownership and if their products should be included in scope of this bug bounty program.

To set the record straight, we are adding a new out of scope asset named Historical + Divestitures which will play host to a list of all these products/domains/companies that have separated from ownership by Verizon Media. To jump-start this list, the following companies will be added as Out of Scope:

  • About.me
  • MovieFone
  • Patch Media
  • PawNation
  • Shoutcast
  • Style Me Pretty
  • Winamp

Not sure if something is in scope because it’s not listed? Here’s a couple things that we do when we get asked that question:

  1. Check the About Us or Contact Us pages on the website
  2. Check whois <domain> data
  3. Trace the IPs associated using dig <domain>
  4. Search wikipedia for the company to find out if AOL, Yahoo, VDMS, or Verizon purchased them, and if so, was the company ever sold after that
  5. Look up the company on Crunchbase
  6. Searching the internet for who owns <company>

Still not sure? Ask us, or submit a report to our program and we will do our own digging from inside the company to track down ownership of the product. If you find something we don’t own, we’ll let you self-close the report so it doesn’t impact your ratings.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us however works for you. We’ve even stood up a channel, #verizonmedia, on the Bug Bounty Forum slack workspace to specifically engage in conversation with our bug hunter community.

Happy Hacking,



The Paranoids