Electric Car making company Tesla and some other multinationals based in America are said to be paying freelance hackers $500,000 a year to notify security flaws and report the same to them with ‘ethics’.
However, the companies are not hiring anyone with ease. As they are found filtering only the talent which made success in ethical hacking platforms like BugCrowd- a Cybersecurity platform which connects ethical hackers to organizations to conduct trusted security research programs.
Bug Crowd, a Cybersecurity startup founded in 2012 offers multiple security flaw chasing programs to hackers every year. As a part of the project, hackers are asked to sign a predefined contract for a specific company and get paid bounty when they are able to track down a security flaw in the company’s digital infrastructure.
Traditionally, the pay depends on the freelancer’s talent and the kind of flaw they have detected. If they have found a major flaw, then the reward will be accordingly. If it is a minute vulnerability, then the reward will be minimum say $1,000.
As per the highly placed sources of Cybersecurity Insiders, a cloud company offered $113,000 for a bug found on its database which could have led the firm to a billion dollar loss if the flaw was otherwise exploited by hackers.
News is out that half of the hackers who attained success in their jobs bagged full-time posts in the companies which hired them. And the top 50 hackers sourced from BugCrowd are reported to be receiving $145,000 per year.
Note- In October this year, US Department of Defense offered a program called “Hack the Pentagon” to the freelance hackers sourced from Bugcrowd.
Hiring stats released by the company San Francisco based company say 94% of bug hunters from the company are in the age group of 18 to 44 while several of them are still in high/middle school. As the cost of entry onto the crowdsourced Cybersecurity startup is low, over 10k individuals are being added to the list every year. However, those with a degree in the said field are making merry, while others are said to be making a comfortable living.
Casey Ellis, the CTO of BugCrowd says that the year 2021 will ring in as many as 3.5 million cyber jobs.
Hackerone, Synack, Cobalt are other hacking platforms which work similar to BugCrowd.
So, all your ethical hackers out there. Why the wait….when the whole cyber world is waiting for you to explore!
