Air Force Awards $12,500 for One Bug

A code execution vulnerability on an Air Force Portal host system that would allow attackers to manipulate data on the system earned one bug bounty hunter $12,500 during the second Hack the Air Force bug bounty program, HackerOne announced today.

Hack the Air Force 2.0 was the latest installment of the US Department of Defense's (DoD) "Hack the Pentagon" security initiative.

The 20-day project kicked off with a launch event Dec. 9 in New York City attended not only by vulnerability researchers hunting for bugs, but by DoD and US Air Force personnel conducting live remediation. At the launch, 55 vulns were discovered in nine hours; another 51 were found in the remaining weeks.

A total of $103,883 was paid out to participating hackers during the 20-day period. The $12,500 payment is the largest single bounty issued from any federal program to date.    

Over 3,000 total vulnerabilities have been resolved in government systems since the first federal vulnerability disclosure program was opened in 2016, according to HackerOne. Twenty-seven trusted researchers from the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, and Latvia participated in Hack the Air Force 2.0.

For more info, view the video recap of the launch event 

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