The good guys have scored. A group of white hat hackers has made USD 32.000,00 over the previous sixty days. They owe their earnings to the successful reporting of security problems in several cryptocurrency and blockchain technology projects.
Fifteen different security firms awarded the money between March 28th and May 16th. The hackers’ achievements are documented in over thirty public reports and security audits.
The sheep are not all the same, as the saying goes. Discovering a specific security problem pays different fees depending on how severe the exploit is and who is offering the money. According to the reports, most of the awards were given by OmiseGo (a security firm) and were worth about USD 100,00. Block.one, the company behind the EOS blockchain and digital asset, and the blockchain startup Aeternity had different ideas. They made their individual rewards as high as USD 10.000,00, and they paid them off over the two months in question.
Tron is also in the mix. Justin Sun’s project paid USD 3.500,00 to a security expert (which you could also call a hacker if you must) after he reported a vulnerability. It was a serious flaw that could have compromised the whole blockchain, and even bring it down.
In an announcement that followed the vulnerability, the project explained how an attacker could have flooded the available memory on a single computer, then performed a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) on Tron’s whole network taking advantage of some malicious lines of code present in smart contracts.
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The field is still wide open if you’re interested and you have the skill. The giant cryptocurrency exchange platform Binance is willing to pay as much as USD 10.000,00 for each vulnerability they classify as “P1: Critical”. Such an achievement can have a reward as juicy as USD 100.000,00 per user. The P1 classification is not Binance’s, but it’s based on Bugcrowd’s Vulnerability Rating Taxonomy.
During 2018, white hat hackers collected USD 878.000,00 for helping some of the crypto verse’s most significant projects to keep their security standards up. From that quantity, Coinbase paid USD 290.381,00, and Tron was good for USD 76.200,00. So this is not the first time that expertise is rewarded for playing fair.
This is refreshing news. Black hat hackers get a lot of attention always, even when the hack is not that big in terms of stolen value, or when it’s not very technically savvy. That inflated attention doesn’t help crypto to improve its reputation (especially in the mainstream) because it brings the outside focus to some events that do not happen all that often, and that represent the worst in the crypto verse. Today’s news, on the other hand, shows the commitment that several prominent blockchain projects have to keep their networks, users, and holders secure.
It’s normal that the regular work on security carried out by every blockchain project in the world doesn’t get that much attention. For the most part, it’s routinary work that is almost always under-the-hood stuff. Most users neither care a lot about or are capable of understanding it in full, until something terrible happens. But it’s still good to know that security concerns are taken seriously by the crypto verse at large.
Disclaimer: Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.