“The global representation of hackers in the MINDEF Bug Bounty Challenge shows the overwhelming appetite from the hacker community to help governments operate more securely,” said Alex Rice, co-founder and CTO at HackerOne. “The Singapore Ministry of Defence must be applauded for being one of first few government agencies, and the first in Asia, to embrace such a forward-thinking approach to security. MINDEF’s program signals further momentum for government agency collaboration with the hacker community.”
MINDEF joins government agencies like the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. General Service Administration and the European Commission who have leveraged the global hacker community to surface vulnerabilities before they were exploited by criminals. Other organizations that have adopted the bug bounty model include progressive companies like Google Play, Nintendo, General Motors, Starbucks and others.
“Due to the fast-changing cybersecurity landscape, no agency can single handedly keep up with the identification and plugging of security gaps by itself. Inviting white hat hackers to test our systems allowed MINDEF to find previously unidentified vulnerabilities quickly, and effectively strengthen the security of our defence systems,” said Mr David Koh, Deputy Secretary (Special Projects) and Defence Cyber Chief at Singapore’s Ministry of Defence. “The success of the program helped us boost our cybersecurity in a matter of weeks.”
About HackerOne
HackerOne is the #1 hacker-powered security platform, helping organizations receive and resolve critical vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. More than 1,000 organizations, including the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. General Service Administration, General Motors, Google Play, Twitter, GitHub, Nintendo, Panasonic Avionics, Qualcomm, Starbucks, Dropbox and the CERT Coordination Center trust HackerOne to find critical software vulnerabilities. HackerOne customers have resolved over 63,000 vulnerabilities and awarded over $25M in bug bounties. HackerOne is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in London and the Netherlands.