Ride-sharing service Uber is offering friendly hackers rewards of up to $10,000 to hack its system and reveal security flaws.
On Tuesday, Uber announced its official bug bounty program and said it will pay up to $10,000 to friendly, so-called White Hat hackers for revealing critical flaws that will help to improve security at Uber.
The company has also created a first of its kind loyalty reward program that is designed to encourage White Hat hackers to dig deep and help Uber to deal with even the most subtle bugs.
"This bug bounty program will help ensure that our code is as secure as possible. And our unique loyalty scheme will encourage the security community to become experts when it comes to Uber," Joe Sullivan, chief security officer of Uber said.
In 2015, Uber had launched a private, beta bug bounty program for over 200 security researchers, who found nearly 100 bugs that were all later fixed.
In February last year, Uber said that a security breach could have compromised personal information related to about 50,000 current and former drivers.
According to the company, hackers could have broken into one of its databases that could have impacted the names and license numbers of the drivers across multiple states in the U.S.
Under Uber's official bug bounty program, the first reward program season will begin on May 1 and will last for a period of 90 days. Bounty hunters will be eligible for the reward program once they have found four issues that have been accepted by Uber as genuine bugs.
If hackers finds a fifth issue within the 90 day period, they will get an additional, bonus payout that will be equivalent to 10 percent of the average payouts for all the other issues found in that session.
Uber noted that the same rules will apply for any additional bugs reported within that 90 day session.
Uber has developed a "treasure map" guide to show security researchers how to find the different classes of bugs across its codebase. This will be regularly updated.
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