This 25 year old hacker makes $100,000 a year moonlighting as ‘bug bounty’ hunter

25 year-old cofounder of HackerOne makes $100,000 a year from finding bugs

Bugs are a major pain to the tech industry because a single unpatch bug can mean a worrisome data leak of millions of users of that particular product. Hunting for bugs by default becomes a prized profession and bug bounty hunters are known to make good amount of money. But 25 year-oldย Jobert Abma takes the cake of being a hacker and a bug bounty hunter rolled into one.

Abma is the cofounder of a hot new startup called HackerOneย which is into the business of bug hunting. Abmaย has beenย breakingย into computers since he was 13 and he has been helped in it by hisย best friend Michiel Prins who is also the cofounder of HackerOne.

Growing up in the Netherlands, Abma gave Prins an unusual graduation present: the username and password toย a local TV station that did a regular news broadcast about the school.ย The duo then took control of the TV station and ran their own broadcast on live TV instead.

“The TV station was not amused,” Abma toldย Business Insider.

The teachers blamed Prins, who was a year older than Abma, for the hack, and “he never told them that I was to blame,” Abma says.ย Prins wound up having to do 25 hours of community service washing windows, but “thatโ€™s what best friends are for.”

Next up, both of them attendedย college together atย Hanze University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. In college they found a flaw in the software that managed grades of the students. Instead of using the flaw for increasing their grades, they toldย software vendorย about the flaw and never heard back, Abma recalls.

So they reported the hole to the university. The school contactedย the company and the company patched the flaw. The university was so impressed, it hired the pair toย do a bigger vulnerability test on that softwareย for the university.

“We made so much money on that contract that we could pay for our college tuition,” he says. “We were going to college and at the same time working for the university.”

The university lauded their work published their research.

“That was a very exciting time. We were 19 and 20 years old. And we were making roughly $10,000 a week justย the two of us,” he says. “For two college kids, that was a very large amount of money.”

With this background, the two moved to San Francisco and cofounded HackerOne along withย Merijn Terheggen and Alex Rice, the former head of product security at Facebook.

I know someone who is going for $500,000 this year as his personal goal. Heโ€™s capable.

HackerOne is a websiteย where companies can ask hackers to attackย them, and then pay fees based on the holes found. The scarier the hole, the bigger the fee. HackerOne takes a 20% commission in all the bug discoveries that its hackers make.

HackerOneย gives the tech company access to tailormade and screened pool of top quality hackers. It also offers the hackers pentesting software and tools for finding bugs. Its customers includeย everyone fromย big tech companies to startups, including theย Department of Defense, GM, Slack, Twitter, Yahoo, and Uber.

The startup hasย 500 customers and aboutย about 50 employees and has raisedย $34 million in funding.

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