The good news is that all of this is voluntary. If you don't like the program or the rewards, there is no obligation to participate.

It should be noted that the reward from Google is on top of whatever the company in question may pay. Companies that develop Android apps can start their own programs with their own bounties. Google's program comes on top of that.

As a hacker, the more you submit valid vulnerability reports on HackerOne, the more skilled you will become and the higher your reputations score will go. This in turn will allow you to make money on many other programs.

It's not easy to become a top whitehat hacker, but if you do, the rewards are significant.

Here is how HackerOne celebrated the $500,000 milestone for a hacker: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hackerone.com%2Fblog%2Fmlitchfield-Earned-500000-on-HackerOne

(Sorry for first posting this as Anonymous Coward. I had forgotten to sign in.)

This is an interesting question. We don't really know what will happen long term. One possibility, as you point out, is that black markets will always outpay any other market. Another possibility is that the ethical hacker community will become so large and strong that they will find all those same vulnerabilities and deliver them to the system owners before the black market gets to build exploits and use them for nefarious purposes. It takes just one ethical hacker who finds a critical 0day to deliver it to a service like HackerOne, and the market for that vuln is over. Although asymmetry is usually in the favor of the criminal actor, in this case it is in the favor of ethical behavior. One ethical hacker can put an end to the sale of a 0day on the black market.

What I find interesting is that a regular newspaper will write about this despite it being a highly technical topic. The readers of New York Post are regular citizens. This shows that software security and the hunt for bugs are becoming important enough to be presented to the broader public.

Given the ease of submission and speed of payment, a bug bounty can be very well worth it. On HackerOne, there is a hacker who made over $600,000 in two years with most of the individual bounties well under $10k.

On Apple laptops the fn key coupled with the left arrow and right arrow maps to the home button and end button. So shift + function + right can give you the behaviour you want. By default home and end behave slightly differently on OS X, but that can be easily fixed to make them behave as you'd expect:
http://apple.stackexchange.com...

Ha ha. That's a common joke about the security industry. There is some truth to it.

What's great with bug bounty programs is that customers pay for results. You pay for valid and useful vulnerability reports. You don't pay for reports that are not useful. For hackers to make money (and the best ones make a lot of money), they must produce useful and relevant vulnerability reports.

That's a HUGE difference compared to traditional security products and services and it explains why bug bounty programs are becoming so popular. They are much more effective than any other method of finding vulns in live software.

Yep, 70,000 is a lot! The number keeps growing, and we hope to get to a million. To serve all companies and government organizations worldwide who will be needing bug bounty programs, we need a lot of excellent hackers.

It should also be noted that it takes a lot of hacking to find even a simple vulnerability. Of the 70,000 hacker accounts we have, about 1 in 6 have filed an actual vulnerability report. To help them get going, we have an ebook on hacking that we give to new hackers. Once new hackers get the hang of bug hunting they can advance fast, earning more and more reputation points. When you sign up at HackerOne, you start at 100 points. Our most prolific hackers have reached 10,000 points. You can do it, too!

Yep this is true. It is also a common situation that humanity has dealt with successfully many times. To keep a ship afloat, you must find and fix every hole. Even one hole might sink it. To keep an aircraft safely flying, similarly every safety aspect must be in shape. Shipping and airlines have great safety track record these days.

To keep software secure, you must attempt to fix all serious vulnerabilities. You may never get to 100% vuln-free software, but the closer you get and the faster you can asymptotically move towards that goal, the more you reduce your cybersecurity risk.

Ooops sorry slashdotters - three zeros missing. Above it should say "HackerOne has already paid out over $10,000,000 to hackers".

:-)

Sometimes we need to repeat old insights to make sure that the broader society is aware.

It has taken decades for the industry to get used to bug bounties. The first one was in 1981. Now it is starting to be very real. HackerOne has already paid out over $10,000 to hackers and researchers around the world. One hacker has made over half a million dollars. Another recently bought an apartment for his mother with the bounty money he had made. Still lots of work and education to do, but it is very much moving in the right direction. An example: the US DoD now committing $7m to vulnerability disclosure programs.

- Marten (HackerOne CEO)

Great question. We are seeing a lot of interest among enterprises to have AWS-like functionality in their own datacenters. And we also know that they are eager to use OpenStack. So at Eucalyptus we decided to do something about it. Here is my blog about the topic: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eucalyptus.com%2Fblog%2F2014%2F08%2F11%2Fwhy-eucalyptus-keynoting-openstack-conference

Thanks for the suggestion. That’s funny! I will do my best on all fronts at HP.

You bring up an interesting and relevant point about how various APIs are used by the applications. But when I think about how the world of software is evolving, it seems that those management APIs are becoming more important, because a software application of today must know not just how to run, but also how to be deployed.

I believe it is both difficult and important to align with dominant designs. 30 years ago it was a good bet to develop software for the new x86 architecture, 15 years ago it was a good idea to bet on the new world-wide web, 10 years ago on the new LAMP stack. Today, the API layer is where different pieces of software come together and where brilliant software developers congregate. It's about AWS, but it's even more about the new design paradigm that the AWS APIs represent. Of course there will not be just one set of APIs. We know that in addition to AWS, we have OpenStack, Microsoft, VMware and Google are all building theirs. One of them will be dominant. Randy Bias brings forward an important point.