Julia R. Livingston and Craig A. Newman of Patterson Belknap write:
Almost weekly, it seems there is another news article about a bug bounty program sponsored by a major corporation where an amateur hacker – often a teenager – is paid a sizeable sum of money for finding a bug in a company’s operating system or code. Often, these articles describe just how much money these teens make from bug bounty programs; one headline from March 12, 2019 states how bug bounty programs have made “one teen a millionaire hacker.” In another from February 2019, Apple paid a 14-year-old hacker an undisclosed sum after he found a security flaw in FaceTime.
In reality, bug bounty programs don’t always result in Robin Hood-like successes touted by the news media.
Read more on Data Security Law Blog.