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The term hacker is often used pejoratively, but the ability to spot weaknesses in companies’ software and cyber-security systems is in high demand. Ethical hackers are now earning big bucks and the industry is growing.
James Kettle is a bug hunter – not of the insect kind, but of software.
He scans through pages of code looking for mistakes – weaknesses that criminals could exploit to break into a company’s network and steal data.
His computer science degree was a little slow-paced for his tastes so he looked around for something else to do and came across “bug bounty” programmes run by Google and browser maker Mozilla.
These are schemes that pay cash to hackers for spotting mistakes, or bugs, in companies’ software.
“They really made you work hard for each one and it took about 50 hours per valid bug I found,” he recalls.
The payoff, apart from the cash, was that he was struck by an insatiable desire to keep finding flaws in code. And this eventually turned into a lucrative career.
And he’s very good at his job.
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