19-year-old white hat earned a million dollars from bug bounty hunting

Argentine teenager, 19-year-old Santiago Lopez reported the vulnerability through the bug reward platform HackerOne, becoming the first white hat hacker to make a million dollars through bug bounty hunting. His white hat career began in 2015 and has reported over 1,670 security vulnerabilities.

The hacker said,

I am incredibly proud to see that my work is recognized and valued. Not just for the money, but because this achievement represents the information of companies and people being more secure than they were before, and that is incredible. I’m sure that anyone who discovers bug bounty programs will soon too realize that it opens up new opportunities for both hackers and companies who are committed to security.

Government agencies and companies such as the Pentagon, GM, Google, Twitter, GitHub, Nintendo, Lufthansa, Panasonic Avionics, Qualcomm, Starbucks, Dropbox, and Intel worked with HackerOne to launch bug bounty program. These programs discover more than 100,000 vulnerabilities and paid more than $45 million in the bounty.

Via: ZDNet