The Snowdens: new awards for hackers
And so to Austin in Texas, where tech investor Bill Gurley was interviewed on stage by eminent financial journalist Malcolm Gladwell on stage at SXSW.
The conversation turned to hacking, and one of Gurley’s more recent investments Hacker1, which gives rewards to hackers who have found vulnerabilities in companies’ cyber security and reporting it to them.
“How do you know what to pay them?” asked Gladwell.
“There’s a scalable list depending on the type of vulnerability,” replied Gurley.
“So basically what you have done is regulated a criminal market?” posited Gladwell.
He then went on to suggest they could hold hacker awards called The Snowdens and held in Belgrade, a nod to Eastern Europe being a hotbed of hacking.
“There’s a lot of potential in this idea,” added Gladwell.