Pierluigi Paganini August 29, 2019

HackerOne announced that five more hackers have become millionaires thanks to their contributes to the bug bounty programs managed by the platform.

Bug bounty platform HackerOne announced that four more hackers have become millionaires after participating in the bug bounty programs managed by the platform. In March, HackerOne announced that two of its members have each earned more than $1 million by participating bug bounty programs.

The first white hat hacker that was able to earn over $1 million through HackerOne programs was Santiago Lopez from Argentina. Lopez is a 
19-year-old hacker goes online with the moniker ‘@try_to_hack’ is a member of the HackerOne platform since 2015. The young hacker has already discovered thousands of vulnerabilities through the platform, including flaws in Twitter and Verizon Media services.

“Hacking can open doors to anyone with a laptop and curiosity about how to break things,” said @mlitchfield. “I hope our achievements will encourage other hackers, young and old, to test their skills, become part of our supportive community, rake in some extra $$$’s along the way and make the internet a much safer place for people.”

The second white-hat hacker who made the headlines earning over $1 million is Mark Litchfield, which goes online with the moniker ‘mlitchfield.’ Litchfield discovered hundreds of vulnerabilities in the software from major firms, including Dropbox, Yelp, Venmo, Starbucks, Shopify and Rockstar Games.

Now other hackers entered in the club of the HackerOne’s millionaries, below an excerpt of the announcement published by the company:

“In March 2019, HackerOne announced that Santiago Lopez, known as @try_to_hack, a 19-year-old hacker from Argentina, was the world’s first hacker to earn $1 million with bug bounty programs. Now, Mark Litchfield (@mlitchfield) from the U.K., Nathaniel Wakelam (@nnwakelam) from Australia, Frans Rosen (@fransrosen) from Sweden, Ron Chan (@ngalog) from Hong Kong, and Tommy DeVoss (@dawgyg) from the U.S. joined the $1M hacker ranks by hacking for improved internet security. “

The club is now composed of six researchers that have earned over $1 million in bounties.

HackerOne disclosed this information as part of the 2019 Hacker-Powered Security Report based on 123,000+ unique resolved security flaws and more than 1,400 customer programs. The company said that more than $62 million in bounties were earned by hackers from over 150 countries.

The importance of bug bounty program is confirmed by the fact that six of the ten top banks in North America are working with HackerOne.

“Every five minutes, a hacker reports a vulnerability. Every 60 seconds, a hacker partners with an organization on HackerOne,” continues the announcement. “That’s more than 1,000 interactions per day with hackers and companies or governments working towards a safer internet.”

According to the report, 25 percent of all resolved vulnerabilities were classified as high to critical severity in the past 12 months, this caused an increase in the bounty payments. The company revealed that the average bounty paid for critical vulnerabilities increased 48% over last year’s average across all industries to $3,384; up from $2,281.

This data represents a 71% increase over the 2016 average of $1,977. The most competitive programs today like Google, Microsoft,

In the past year, security researchers that reported vulnerabilities through HackerOne platform earned in total $21 million, representing an increase of $10 million over the previous year.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – HackerOne, bug bounty)

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