So you think you are good at it and you want to make money hacking. Legally that is. The good news is that yes, you can make more money than you can ever think of as a legal and responsible hacker.
Many hackers have turned in much money from sites such as Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and a host of others. Even teenage hackers. The business of making money as a very legal and responsible hacker is even booming greatly. That is as a result of the unending cyber attacks suffered by these sites.
Before anything, there are two types of hackers; the black hat hackers and the white hat hackers. While the black hat hackers are the bad guys who can hack bank accounts, CCTV cameras, jam securities and even hack facebook accounts, the white hat hackers are the good ones. They try to play by the rules and make anything and everything they do legit.
Wiredbugs takes a look at 5 ways that you can make money hacking legally.
1. The bug bounty business
This is where most young hackers make huge sums of money. What they do is that they snoop around massive sites including Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo, to find Bugs that could be detrimental to the sites or allow in leakages from hackers.
See Also: Teenage Hackers: it’s not about the money, they just want to impress and as moral crusade
Once they find such bugs they report to the sites and immediately get paid for it. Think it as someone climbing your roof to see if he can find any hole and once he does, you pay him for letting you know so as to prevent rain from dripping in.
Before now, Google had its Bug Bounty at $2.7million awarded once a year. It has however changed this in the first quarter of 2017, hence the contest will now run year round. The total prize pool of “∞ million*.” has been kept for it. What this means is that the money will keep coming once you find something.
Gone are the days when Bug bounty programs only attracted informal rewards such as a thank you note, free t-shirt, an online shoutout, or sometimes, a few hundred dollars.
Thanks to startups like Crowdcurity, Bugcrowd, Synack, and HackerOne companies can now launch their bug bounties and this has made the pay increase steadily.
Other companies that pay for bugs include those listed below:
- BitGo: $100-$1,000
- Dropbox: $216-$4,913
- Facebook: $500+
- FastMail: $100-$5,000
- Pinterest: $50-$1,500
- Magento: $100-$10,000
- Microsoft: $500-$100,000
- Paypal: $100-$10,000
- Spotify: $250+
- Stripe: $500+
- Tumblr: $200-$1,000
- Western Union: $100-$5,000
There are both real markets and black markets for the bug bounty.
2. Government funding
Just like individuals and companies, governments are scared of being hacked. So what they do is that they may decide to fund hackers to keep watch and ensure that they are not hacked. If you say getting a thief to catch a thief you would be right.
Also, Governments around the world sometimes get hackers to track down other hackers or to perform other tasks. These tasks are mostly classified under national security, and they may include stealing military data or even industrial and economic espionage. Have you heard that Russia hacked the US elections?
That is how you can make money while hacking for the government. This is as the US had to use other hackers, either employed or on contract to track the hackers.
3. Working on a company payroll
As a white hat hacker, you can get employed by various company to carry out various reasons. One of such is, of course, ensuring the security of their site. They check to see if there are any loopholes as well as find out digital fingerprints if there are any hackings.
Some companies may sometimes want to get it sinister by wanting you to steal around and get some stuff from competitors such as prototypes, reports, or something else.
4. Writing security software
It will be good to understand that although programmers and Hackers are completely different from each other, a hacker can go into the writing of securities that would prevent Black hat hackers from thriving.
Such securities could be for specific companies or for general use, and it could be on contract or one can just decide to write and sell.
5. Teaching security and ethical hacking
Okay, this is not exactly how to make money hacking, it is more of how to make money from your knowledge as a hacker. What is the need of good knowledge if you cannot pass it on?
As a good white hat hacker, you can teach others the business of ethical and responsible hacking. The only problem that may come with this is that you do not know who is looking for suck knowledge for what dubious reasons.
