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Bug Bounties To Make You Rich (Maybe): Arrives To AI Driverless Cars Too
Dr. Lance B. Eliot, AI Insider
Bounty hunter needed to find a copper pot that went missing from a small shop. Reward for recovery of the copper pot will be 65 bronze coins. So said a message during the Roman Empire in the city of Pompeii.
In more modern times, you might be aware that in the 1980s there were some notable bounties offered to find bugs in off-the-shelf software packages and then in the 1990’s Netscape notably offered a bounty for finding bugs in their web browser. Google and Facebook had each opted toward bounty hunting for bugs starting in the 2010 and 2013 years, respectively, and in 2016 even the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) got into the act by having a “Hack the Pentagon” bounty effort (note that the publicly focused bounty was for bugs found in various DoD related websites and not in defense mission critical systems).
According to statistics published by the entity HackerOne, the monies paid out in 2017 toward bug bounty discoveries totaled nearly $12 million dollars and for 2018 it sized up to be more than $30 million dollars. For bugs that are considered substantive issues by a software maker, the usual everyday bounty is around $2,000 per bug (once it is confirmed that the bug exists). Bounties though are decided by the eye of the beholder in…
