A bug hunter's job, emerging job in the technological age

Below is the story of Evan Ricafort, a "bug" hunter - a "bug hunter" based on the article posted on editor Erin Winick's MIT Technology Review.

Evan Ricafort, a 22-year-old boy living in the Philippines with his family in a small apartment. This guy works in a closed room at home for 75 hours a week, staring at a computer screen to save personal data of people he has never known.

Bug hunter is a special and growing profession. It is a combination of a group of honest hackers looking for errors, vulnerabilities, weaknesses in large companies' software, websites before hackers discover and find ways to break into to receive bonuses. .

Evan Ricafort is a bug hunter but this guy doesn't have a computer science degree or code. The reason Ricafort stepped into this career was because his friend showed off the amount of bonuses he earned when he found a network's vulnerability. So Ricafort began to be curious, went online to find out about security researchers and tried to learn about this emerging profession.

At first, everyone around didn't understand this bug hunter job, but after Ricafort received the bonus, the reward for his efforts was worth it, so people recognized this as a real job.

This work for Ricafort not only helped him make money but also gave him the opportunity to help companies and individuals who use the company's services.

For the past 4 years, Ricafort has pointed out code errors of more than 200 companies and organizations, including big names in technology villages such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, PayPal, Yahoo, IBM and Twitch. Last year, Ricafort received $ 5,000 from a company he refused to name. This is the largest amount of Ricafort's career. Like every other young man, Ricafort celebrates by traveling and rewarding himself a BMX bike.

But Ricafort, the bug hunter's village, is known for an achievement that didn't give him any money. That was when Ricafort first entered the profession (in 2014), he discovered a serious error of Google Nest, hackers can take advantage of this flaw to get all personal information (identity card and passport number). and financial information of Nest users.

With this discovery, Evan Ricafort was honored by Google on the gold board of its award program. But Ricafort was not awarded cash by Google's security team saying that the error Ricafort discovered belonged to third-party software and not its. After that time, Google paid for every other bug he found.

It was not the first time Ricafort did not receive cash for his discovery. Many other organizations have many other methods, not cash to pay him like applauding, visiting the company's headquarters, or a T-shirt donated by the Dutch government. The word "I hacked into the Dutch government apparatus and received only a sleek T-shirt".

On average, Ricafort earns about 10,000 piso (equal to 4,300,000 VND), equal to the basic salary in the Philippines and enough for him to live through the day. There were months that Ricafort earned quite well, 20,000 or 30,000 piso (equivalent to 8,670,000 VND to 13,000,000 VND).

The erratic amount of money is the nature of this work, and this amount will not be enough to cover life in countries with expensive spending. But bug hunting is booming. There are companies that have good remuneration policies for the community of bug hunters, who easily contact companies that need more work and can earn more regular amounts.

Ricafort really loved the bug hunt, enjoying the differences that the hunters created were silently finding weaknesses in a long and confusing code to prevent outside attacks. .

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