HackerOne just lately introduced that over the previous six years, the bug bounty platform has minted 50 recent million-dollar bounty hunters by offering them an simply accessible platform to assist corporations ferret out safety vulnerabilities in software program, for large money payouts.
However it wasn’t all the time this straightforward to make a complete hustle out of moral hacking. There’s been a shift within the tradition, from “fringe exercise to financially viable occupation,” in accordance with HackerOne. That change did not occur by probability. It was deliberately crafted by the desire of infosec’s earliest pioneers.
Kevin Mitnick is an ideal instance. He catapulted to the highest of the business regardless of touchdown on the FBI’s Most Needed Checklist at simply 17 years previous. Scared straight by the expertise, he grew up and devoted his genius to defending networks in opposition to risk actors. And by the point of his dying in 2023, Mitnick was hailed as a cybersecurity “hacker superhero.”
In September 2019, two pen testers named Gary De Mercurio and Justin Wynn have been arrested for conducting a contracted evaluation at a courthouse in Dallas County, Iowa. And after years of authorized wrangling, the fees have been finally dropped, however the two nonetheless battle with employment background checks, issue gaining clearances, and extra, all on account of the blemish on their report, they defined on a current Darkish Studying Confidential episode.
On the time of the arrests, Wynn mentioned the help from the broader hacker neighborhood was overwhelming.
“Plenty of the hackers, the neighborhood that rallied round us mentioned we’re pulling out of Iowa,” Wynn defined. “[The community said] ‘We’re not going to do jobs there if that is how they’re treating us.'”
