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From Pornhub to hackers: “Who’s in for $25K?”
Tuesday, the popular pornography site Pornhub disclosed a hackers bounty program for site bug hacker hunting. Many jokes come to our mind, but the $25K figure is a money cold bucket of reality.
The site, owned by MindGeek, a Canadian private company, will pay ethical hackers dubbed white hat hackers to find vulnerabilities in their site and report the cracks to the administrators.
This program is being run on HackerOne, a start-up company capitalizing on bug bounty. The company began with Facebook and is now operating similar bug-finding programs for General Motors, Twitter, Dropbox, Yahoo, Uber and, you’ll never guess who else – yes, the United States Department of Defense.
Other security problem detection programs like HackerOne are gaining momentum because they can offer outside help for the internal teams working with code.
Synack and Bugcrowd are two of the companies running this type of programs. They work for sharks like Adobe, Snapchat or Square. Heavyweight tech companies like Microsoft and Google have also turned to bounty programs, but they have used their internal platforms for it.
Following the example of the “major tech players”, Corey Price, the vice president of Pornhub stated that they too want to tap into the existing hacking talent as a measure of precaution. This program would mean an addition to their development and security teams.
The bounty rewards range from $5 to $25.000. To receive the prize, hackers must report and detail the vulnerability with screenshots and code. This reporting should be, of course, disclosed only to the Pornhub admins.
More rules say hackers will not interrupt the porn service of the adult entertainment website, will not use automated tools, and the bug should be reported 24 hours after its discovery.
It would take the security team up to a month to reply and depending on the complexity of the bug, up to three months to fix it.
With 60 million – wait for it – daily visitors, Pornhub is the second most popular pornographic site in the world. Yes, almost 1% of the world is accessing this porn site alone, daily. No wonder they’re taking all the available help there is.
They’ve also been the target of someone’s malware before. An advertising malicious scheme attacked the site in November 2015. They recovered and learned from the mistake.
Now, who’s first to crack, not the porn site, but a joke on this $25K from Pornhub to hackers news?
Image source: Wikimedia
