Hackers can be paid large sums of money if they find and report valid security weaknesses to an organization through HackerOne, the number one hacker powered pentesting and bug bounty platform. The company recently announced that six individual hackers now have been awarded over $1 million each in bug bounty for identifying in aggregate over five thousand security flaws that, when resolved, protect millions of people from having their data compromised.
The ethicial hackers range in age and work in countries all over the world, including the U.S, India, Russia, Hong Kong, and Australia. As hackers find more severe vulnerabilities among companies, the demand for hackers has risen with the average award being paid for each critical bounty increasing from $2,281 to $3,384. Just this past March a teenager became the first hacker to surpass the $1 million milestone on the HackerOne Platform that has now been followed by five others.
Every five minutes a hacker reports a vulnerability and every minute a hacker partners with an organization on HackerOne, showing the increase in demand to protect consumer data around the globe. The biggest tech companies today, like Google and Microsoft, are taking even stronger steps to identify security threats, offering individual bounty awards as high as $1,500,000 for critical issues that are reported.
“When I first started hacking, I did not expect to ever make it on the leaderboard,” said Ron Chan, a hacker with the username @ngaolg. “ It was a great moment to hit that $1 million dollar milestone and be in such great company with the five others.”
HackerOne’s 2019 Security Report provides insights and trends based on hacker activity.
