Indian ethical hackers earn ₹29 crores in 2019, represent 10% of total hackers worldwide

The practice of keeping cyberattacks at bay is faced with a major shortage when it comes to the relevant workforce. This includes ‘White Hat Hackers’ who are skilled at exploring and finding the vulnerabilities that exist in cybersecurity employed by the organisations. According to a bug bounty platform called HackerOne, the platform handed out more than ₹287 crores during 2019 alone. A major group of these ethical hackers were Indian hackers.

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Bug bounty programs for ethical hackers

For the unversed, these bug bounty programs are reward programs for hackers where they are required to find out the vulnerabilities in cybersecurity that were added by tech companies. HackerOne was founded in 2012 and it functions around the main objective of connecting businesses and tech companies with penetration testers and ethical hackers who can locate and fix the security vulnerabilities that the companies might have and be accordingly paid for their ethical hacking services.

The platform boasts of many big clients which include the likes of Google, Airbnb, Alibaba, Goldman Sachs, Spotify, and Dropbox, amongst others. The impressive clientele also includes the U.S. Department of Defense.

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Indian hackers represent 10 per cent of total hackers on the platform

HackerOne has reported having paid a total sum of $40 million (approx. ₹287 crores) in bounties during last year. The company shares its annual report on a yearly basis which also shows the break up for every country. The company reported that of the total bounty in 2019, 19 per cent of the earnings went to ethical hackers based in the United States. The top position was followed by Indian hackers (10 per cent), Russian (8 per cent), Chinese (7 per cent), German (5 per cent) and Canadian (4 per cent).

The percentage marks indicate the total number of 3,150 hackers who participated in the ethical hacking programme. The annual report also featured a survey revealing that 18 per cent of respondents claimed to be full-time ethical hackers, whereas 40 per cent spent about 20 hours in a week hunting bugs.

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Image credits: Unsplash | Jefferson Santos