Sometimes it doesn’t take much to be successful. With Aditi Singh it was a computer, the Internet – and her head. The email that the 20-year-old Indian received on Sunday shared on twitter begins with a simple “hello” and is apparently from the software company Microsoft. It says that she has found an important security hole in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and will receive $ 30,000 for it.
It is quite common for software companies to reward hackers who point out errors. Bug bounty hunting – the hunt for such mistakes for “bounty” – is popular with hackers and IT fans in India in the hope of money and a career. But how do you find such security gaps? “It’s pretty easy when you’re smart enough to search the Internet,” says Singh of the Times of India quoted. Because the special thing about her story, about which various Indian media reported, is not only that she is only 20 years old. Nor did she study computer science at all. She got to know Javascript, MySQL and other programming languages by “searching on Google and watching videos on Youtube,” she told the newspaper. It was only in May that she received EUR 7,500 error head money from Facebook. And a company even hired her as an IT security expert after she pointed out deficiencies.
The hacker from Delhi is celebrated on Twitter, thousands like her post, dozens congratulate – and some want to know how she did it. But they get a piece of advice directly from other users, which should be exactly in Singh’s sense: Google it!
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