Uber’s giving £10k to hackers with a bug bounty program to find security flaws
Uber is offering up to $10,000 to hackers.
No, it's not some sort of blackmail, it's for the friendly sort who can spot security flaws in their technology meaning they can fix it before any not so friendly hackers do.
The so-called bug bounty program offers a tidy cash sum to anyone who can track down bugs in their code as well as a reward program for those who identify multiple issues.
"Even with a team of highly-qualified and well trained security experts, you need to be constantly on the look-out for ways to improve." said chief security officer Joe Sullivan.
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"This bug bounty program will help ensure that our code is as secure as possible. And our unique loyalty scheme will encourage the security community to become experts when it comes to Uber."
This kind of reward is common among most of the tech firms and Google recently upped the bounty to $100,000 for anyone who finds vulnerabilities on its Chromebooks.
Businesses also often reward to so-called white-hat hackers, ethical hackers who break into things such as compute networks, devices and emails, but notify the owners of the breach.
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Uber said it will publicly disclose the bugs if the hacker gives permission once they have been breached.
The top pay out will go to anyone identifying critical issues, with $5,000 for significant issues and $3,000 for medium issues, depending on the severity of the bug. Issues of fraud, however, are not included in the bounty.
Uber has already had a private bug bounty program involving 200 researchers.