Ethical Hackers Have Earned $100m

Bug bounty platform HackerOne has recently announced that it has paid out $100,000,000 in rewards to white-hat hackers around the world at the end of May 2020. Since it started delivering vulnerability reports to its customers, HackerOne bug bounty hunters have found roughly 170,000 security vulnerabilities according to the company's CEO Mårten Mickos.

Freelance elite hackers can make more than $500,000 a year searching for security flaws and reporting those issues at big companies like Tesla and organizations like the US Department of Defense, according to new data released by ethical hacking platform Bugcrowd.

The company, founded in 2012, is one of a handful of so-called “bug bounty” firms that provide a platform for hackers to safely chase security flaws at companies that want to be tested.

Hackers work on a clearly defined contract for a specific company and get paid a bounty when they are able to find a flaw in a company’s infrastructure. How much they’re paid depends on how serious the problem is. Over 700,000 ethical hackers are now using the bug bounty platform to get paid for security bugs in the products of more than 1,900 HackerOne customers.

The total amount of rewards paid to hackers has grown from $10 million between 2014 and 2016, to $30 million between 2017 and 2019, and reached $50 million between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020. 

During 2018 alone, the 300,000 hackers who are part of the bug bounty program earned a combined $19 million in bounties, nearly as much as the platform has awarded in all of the company's previous years combined. 12% of hackers using HackerOne to report security vulnerabilities make over $20,000 each year only from bug bounties, while 1,1% will get rewards worth more than $350,000 annually and 3% being paid over $100,000 per year. It took 5 years to get to $20m in bounties paid.

8 White-Hat Hackers Have Become Millionaires

According to a survey, since enrolled on HackerOne's platform from two years ago, top hackers will earn on average 2.7 times more money in rewards than a software engineer's average salary in the same country. In August 2019 HackerOne also announced that eight of the hackers using its platforms have become millionaires. 

 "As a result of their creativity and tenacity, we predict hackers will have earned $1 billion in bug bounties within five years, protecting companies and governments alike from persistent and ephemeral threats," Maretn Mickos told Bleeping Computer.

To protect against cyberattacks, companies have been using a range of methods to allow people with hacking skills to test their defenses. Some companies use in-house penetration testers, often putting them on so-called red teams to play the role of a malicious collective trying take down corporate servers or steal information.

CNBC:     Bleeping Computer:      Secure World Expo:       

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