Companies are increasingly finding new ways to combat hackers, with crypto techpreneurs employing the services of white hat hackers. Some white hat hackers just got awarded $878,000 in bug bounties after doing well in a competition that was aimed at finding bugs in software belonging to certain companies. These companies would proceed to award the white hat hackers if they responsibly exposed their software vulnerabilities and cleaned them out before malicious hackers took advantage.
According to crypto publication, Nextweb, the white hat hackers made $534,500 on a bug bounty platform known as HackerOne. The HackerOne platform connects hackers just from Block.one, a company which stands behind EOS and responsible for 60 percent of all the bounties handed in the year.
A lot of crypto exchanges are big bounty spenders as well, hiring hackers to eliminate any system vulnerabilities that might exist. One of these exchanges is Coinbase, which is reportedly the second largest bounty spender, spending some $290,381 in 2018 alone. Tron is the third largest bounty spender which reportedly spent $76, 200 in 2018.
According to a HackerOne spokesman, nearly four percent of all bounties awarded on the HackerOne platform is for blockchain vulnerabilities. The average prize for unearthing blockchain bugs in 2018 was $1490 while average hacker one bounty in the 4th quarter of 2018 was about $900.
It’s obvious that big players in the blockchain space attach a whole lot of value on bounty spending and for good reason. Crypto publication Cointelegraph recently reported that EOS decentralized apps (Dapps) lost up to $1 million worth of assets to hackers way back in July. Several companies have suffered losses to hackers in 2018 just like they did in 2017. Thus the interest and investment in bug bounties.
