Uber wants to make its bug bounty program the most alluring

UBER has stepped up its fight against hackers with a program involving treasure maps and a loyalty scheme for friendly hackers.

Uber offers bounty for hackers

UBER is putting its money where its business philosophy is.

The company which made the sharing economy famous by contracting independent drivers on a freelance basis has applied a similar strategy to shore up its cyber security.

The company announced a new bug bounty program this week, offering prize money for hackers who find vulnerabilities in its apps and websites.

Benevolent hackers known as ‘white hats’ could earn more than $6500 for finding a bug that could be used to corrupt or deface Uber’s homepage, or up to $13,000 for finding a vulnerability that would allow a more nefarious hacker the chance to run malicious code through one of the company’s servers.

The competition style offering is nothing new for Silicon Valley with companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook offering similar prize incentives in the past. But Uber’s bounty program is a little different.

The ride-sharing company has taken it a couple steps further and says it will even provide a “treasure map” for bug hunters designed to steer them toward potentially vulnerable areas of the company’s site, reports Wired.

“By giving them a treasure map of the structure of our system, they can spend their time looking for really subtle bugs,” Uber’s head of product security Collin Greene said.

She said the idea of giving up the architecture information was to ensure hackers went deep.

Uber will also reward repeat customers with a loyalty scheme which gives hackers bonus cash if they find multiple bugs in the system.

The company hopes by providing such incentives, they can attract the best computer scientists to search their system as they compete with other companies offering similar programs.

“We want to make this a bug bounty program that researchers adore,” Greene said.

So if you have the required skill set, you can get started here.