Hacking ‘bounty’

Fascination with ethical hacking has taken 19-year-old Rohit Kumar places. To begin with,  his zeal for ethical hacking drove him to join the School of Computer Application, Lovely Professional University where he’s currently a BCA (Hons) 2nd year student. He has earned several bounties over the years for his exceptional work in bug detection from companies like Facebook, IMGUR, Invision and Shopify. He was included in the 'Facebook Hall of Fame' among the world's top 20 Security Researchers in 2018. 

During his vacations he used to dabble in testing different targets like Facebook, Hackerone, etc. until he got a taste of the real thing. 

Recently he was invited to participate in the two-day Security Conference, 'BountyCon' jointly organised by Facebook and Google in Singapore on March 30 and 31, 2019 to identify upcoming security researchers in the Asia-Pacific region. Rohit was one of the few security researchers from Asia-Pacific to be invited for the ‘by-invitation-only’ conference. He received a direct invite from Zach Turk, Security Program Manager at Facebook (US) to join BountyCon.

"BountyCon 2019 was the first live hacking event for me. Meeting some of the world's top ethical hackers like Frans Rosen (@fransrosen), Shubham Shah (@shubs) and Ben Sadeghipour (@nahamsec) taught me a lot, especially the importance of developing my own unique methodology and strategy to improve my skills in ethical hacking and cyber security. I began automating most of the processes and I was able to submit 9 security vulnerabilities in 4 days."     

An entrepreneur by nature, Rohit Kumar has founded two startups ColdFox and EdVoid. "My target is to compete with the world's top security researchers in live hacking events in the next 1.5 years. 

But I do not intend to turn my passion into my profession. I will continue to focus on my startups although I am seriously considering the bug bounty opportunity as it would be a funding source for salaries for my interns and colleagues. Tech-based product development and ethical hacking will always remain a hobby for me. I publish my own detailed reports related to my findings on different tech giants. You can find my most recent findings and methodologies on medium.com/@rohitcoder." — TNS