Santiago Lopez, a 19-year-old expert hacker, has become the first bug bounty hacker to earn over $1 million in bounty awards, earned while helping companies improve their technology security. Since 2015, Lopez has been working through HackerOne, a hacker powered security platform that reports weaknesses to government and major companies including Twitter and Verizon.
HackerOne’s platform has over 330,000 hackers, with Lopez top-ranked which is determined by hackers competing against each other while protecting companies from exploitation. Lopez taught himself how to hack at age 16 and now works full time, specializing in Direct Object Reference vulnerabilities and making nearly forty times the average software engineer salary in Buenos Aires.
In an effort to encourage individuals to take up hacking, the company is now offering free tutorials, called Hacker101, to beginners who want to employ their abilities to help over 1200 company users of HackerOne’s services. Another one of their members, Mark Litchfield, also recently surpassed earning a million dollars in bug bounty by helping major corporations such as Yelp, Venmo, and Starbucks fix their security issues.
“I do not have enough words to describe how happy I am to become the first hacker to reach this landmark,” said Lopez. “I am incredibly proud to see that my work is recognized and valued. To me, this achievement represents that companies and the people that trust them are becoming more secure than they were before, and that is incredible. This is what motivates me to continue to push myself and inspires me to get my hacking to the next level.”
