HackerOne has fired an employee for using bug reports submitted by external researchers to claim extra bounties elsewhere.
The company was compelled to investigate the issue after a customer filed a complaint on June 22 asking it to investigate “a suspicious vulnerability disclosure made outside of the HackerOne platform.”
According to HackerOne co-founder and CISO Chris Evans, the now-former employee’s role was to triage bugs for numerous customer bounty programs.
He said the former employee illegally accessed security reports sometime between April 4 and June 22 and then leaked the information outside the HackerOne platform to claim additional bounties elsewhere.
“This is a clear violation of our values, our culture, our policies and our employment contracts. In under 24 hours, we worked quickly to contain the incident by identifying the then-employee and cutting off access to data. We have since terminated the employee and further bolstered our defenses to avoid similar situations in the future,” Evans said.
HackerOne, the largest bug bounty platform, receives bug reports from ethical hackers about software and analyzes the reports internally to determine whether rewards should be paid to those who reported them.
The sources for this piece include an article in ZDNet.