HackerOne Connects Hackers With Companies, and Hopes for a Win-Win

In 2011, two Dutch hackers in their early 20s made a target list of 100 high-tech companies they would try to hack. Soon, they had found security vulnerabilities in Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter and 95 other companies’ systems.

They called their list the Hack 100.

When they alerted executives of those companies, about a third ignored them. Another third thanked them, curtly, but never fixed the flaws, while the rest raced to solve their issues. Thankfully for the young hackers, no one called the police.

Now the duo, Michiel Prins and Jobert Abma, are among the four co-founders of a San Francisco tech start-up that aims to become a mediator between companies with cybersecurity issues and hackers like them who are looking to solve problems rather than cause them. They hope their outfit, called HackerOne, can persuade other hackers to responsibly report security flaws, rather than exploit them, and connect those “white hats” with companies willing to pay a bounty for their finds.

In the last year, the start-up has persuaded some of the biggest names in tech — including Yahoo, Square and Twitter — and companies you might never expect, like banks and oil companies, to work with their service. They have also convinced venture capitalists that, with billions more devices moving online and flaws inevitable in each, HackerOne has the potential to be very lucrative. HackerOne gets a 20 percent commission on top of each bounty paid through its service.

“Every company is going to do this,” said Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark, which invested $9 million in HackerOne. “To not try this is brain-dead.”

The alternative to so-called moderated bug bounty programs is sticking with the current perverse incentive model. Hackers who find new holes in corporate systems can, depending on their severity, expect six-figure sums to sell their discovery to criminals or governments, where those vulnerabilities are stockpiled in cyberarsenals and often never fixed. Alternatively, when they pass the weaknesses to companies to get them fixed, the hackers are often ignored or threatened with jail.

In essence, the people with the skills to fix the Internet’s security problems have more reasons to leave the web wide open to attack.

“We want to make it easy and rewarding for that next group of skilled hackers to have a viable career staying in defense,” said Katie Moussouris, HackerOne’s chief policy officer, who pioneered the bounty program at Microsoft. “Right now, we’re on the fence.”

Read more: HackerOne Connects Hackers With Companies, and Hopes for a Win-Win

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