It had taken a month of work, but Jesse Kinser had finally hit the jackpot. The security researcher had managed to pull off quite a feat - stealing the source code for more than 10,000 different websites, including a big four consulting company - and the ramifications of her find were staggering.
But contrary to many people\'s perceptions of shadowy hackers, her next move wasn\'t trading the data on the dark web, or crafting exploits to sell to the highest bidder. Rather, she was faced with a different sort of daunting task: developing a responsible disclosure process to notify the thousands of vulnerable companies she\'d just owned. That\'s right, after accessing all that code, her next job was to let the victims know exactly how she\'d done it - and how they could stop someone with a different set of moral guideposts from doing the same.
It\'s all in a day\'s work for the researchers who, driven by curiosity, a common sense of purpose, and the real possibility of financial reward, spend their time hunting bugs online. Welcome to the world of bug bounties, where the hackers are the good guys - or, just as often, the good gals.
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Friday 29th March 2024
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The hackers getting paid to keep the internet safe
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