Of those Christmas days when I cried with a fat chicken lap strung between my eager teeth, I cried because I was not a hacker. I cried because my fingers are not as good with codes as they are at maneuvering a spoon of rice into my mouth. I would have love to with an incantations of codes “open sesame” any system. Though I knew I would have been a weird hacker as I would love to hack Aso Rock just to know how much the toilet roll used by Buhari costs.
And now Apple is giving hackers up to $200,000 for locating the security flaw in Apple’s products. This kind of reward is called “bug bounty programs”. It is actually a culture with major technology firms.
The amount researchers get as reward is categorized with how serious or technical, the flaw they uncover is. The least payment you get for finding a flaw is for $25,000, peaking up to $200,000.
It is right to say Apple’s reward is one of the heftiest rewards we have in the tech industry. Demonstrating further, Uber had offered hackers up to $10,000 while the best Google has gone so far in rewarding hackers is $20,000.
Although the program will be run on an invite-only arrangement to begin with and potential hackers will be selected from a collection of experts who at some point ago had contributed in improving the security of Apple products by discovering security to Apple.
Most times, the major intention powering these bug bounty program is to give opportunity to skilled individuals who may not work at the company, but have a unique ability in cybersecurity, to locate and cleanse off any vulnerabilities.
For truth is, it is actually difficult for the security team at a company to be fully aware of all the flaws a system has.
