Mercer reckons that the first bug bounty was launched some 30 years ago when a reward of $1,000 (£820) was offered for anyone who could find flaws in the operating system that powered the Hubble telescope. 'HackerOne has half a million registered hackers, and 600 new people join every day,' says Laurie Mercer, a security engineer at HackerOne, 'and they have discovered over 130,000 vulnerabilities so far.' The idea of offering bounties for vulnerabilities is far from being a new one.
Department of Defense, and the hackers who can find the vulnerabilities in their systems and services before malicious threat actors can exploit them. HackerOne operates as the conduit between nearly 1,500 organizations, including the likes of General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Spotify, Starbucks, Twitter and even the U.S.
HackerOne announced on August 29 that six hackers signed up to the bug bounty platform have earned more than $1 million each.
