Bug Bounties Brought White Hat Hackers $878,000 In 2018

Seems like 2018 was a great year for white hat hackers since they earned $878,000 from bug bounties according to the latest crypto news today.

Bug bounties are actually a type of competition where many companies participate, especially companies that develop software. Companies such as these invite hackers to crack their software and take a closer look at the vulnerabilities so they can be able to fix them before they bring the software to the public.

According to technology news outlet TheNextWeb, the hackers that were involved in the bug bounties earned $534,500 on one bug bounty platform named HackerOne where the platform connected the hackers with other companies such as Block.one which is the company behind EOS. Block.one is to be held responsible for 60 percent of the handed bounties this year.

Coinbase is the second-largest bounty spender after Block.one and the major crypto exchange spent approximately $290,381 in 2018. Tron takes the third position spending $76,200.

Almost 5 percent of all of the awarded bounties were for blockchain vulnerabilities and for that the average prize was $1,490.

EOS decentralized apps (dApps) have actually lost about a million dollars to hacks since June. Crypto wallet Ledger also pointed out that the company feels sorry for disclosing vulnerabilities in their hardware wallets instead following the standard security principles such as the bounty program.

However, Ledger explained:

‘’In the security world, the usual way to proceed is responsible disclosure… We regret that the researchers did not follow the standard security principles outlined in Ledger’s Bounty program.’’