Uber announces $10,000 bug bounty program

Uber announces their first ever bug bounty program on HackerOne platform on Tuesday. The rewards will be decided according to the severity of bug reported by the security researchers. There are three categories of  rewards; the researchers can take home maximum $10,000 bucks if the reported vulnerability is critical. While the minimum reward is worth $3,000.



Uber has followed the footsteps of some big tech organizations who are using the bug bounty programs to fix critical bugs in their products. The aim of Uber behind launching the bug bounty program is to secure the personal information of their riders and drivers.

The programs kick off from 1st May and security researchers have 90 days to report the bugs in Uber's systems. The Uber's bounty program is not totally identical to bounty program of other silicon valley firms like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Yahoo. Company has taken some unorthodox steps by announcing that it will even provide a “treasure map” for bug hunters designed to steer them toward potentially vulnerable areas of the company’s site.

Collin Greene Head of Uber's Product Security said; "By giving them a treasure map of the structure of our system, they can spend their time looking for really subtle bugs,”. 

Uber has published a list of vulnerabilities in which the company is interested. Some notable vulnerabilities are:

  • Cross-site Scripting (XSS)
  • Cross-site Request Forgery
  • Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)
  • SQL Injection
  • Server-side Remote Code Execution (RCE)

Last year the accounts of Uber's riders has been compromised, news comes out  in September last year when Uber car was on its way to pick their customer/rider in California, but the customer/rider didn't order the Uber's car service. The account of their customer was hacked which opened the Pandora box that hundreds of Uber's accounts has been compromised. The issue was fixed just after two weeks.