Mårten Mickos is one of the most respected members of the open source world. The former CEO of MySQL AB during its prime now serves as the CEO of HackerOne, a vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform. I sat down with Mickos to understand HackerOne’s purpose and his perspective on the security of open source software.
Mårten Mickos is one of the most respected members of the open source world. The former CEO of MySQL AB during its prime now serves as the CEO of HackerOne, a vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform. I sat down with Mickos to understand HackerOne’s purpose and his perspective on the security of open source software.
HackerOne’s Role
In layman’s terms, HackerOne brings the hacker community to an organization to hack into their code in search of vulnerabilities. As Mickos said, “Sometimes we joke that if you are going to be hacked anyway, it’s better to get hacked by someone you can trust.” HackerOne has built a platform for secure intelligence report sharing and payment, along with a reputation system for hackers.
When an organization announces a bug bounty program through HackerOne, the hacker community starts looking at the organization’s code and filing their reports. The platform enables the bug bounty program’s organizer to vet these vulnerabilities. The hacker who filed the report gets rewarded.
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