Pentagon Let Hackers Go Nuts, Fixed Thousands Of Vulnerabilities

Talk about fighting fire with fire. The U.S. Department of Defense, which is situated in the Pentagon has been using hackers to patch vulnerabilities and bugs that could allow other hackers to do major damages. As a result of this Bug Bounty, thousands of potential backdoors have been addressed and there is now a real hope that the U.S. government might stop painting hackers with a broad brush.

As WIRED notes, hackers and governments don’t really get along, even when it’s their own hackers. Something about people having the capability to steal secrets behind a keyboard simply stirs something in the military and politicians’ stomachs. Thanks to a project called “Hack the Pentagon,” however, things have a chance to change.

The premise of the project was simple; pay hackers to find vulnerabilities and then report it to the authorities. Each time a hacker finds bugs and discloses it to the DoD, they will get a cash reward. According to Defense Digital Services Product and Technology Lead, Michael Chung, this was meant to circumvent the limitations imposed on federal technicians.

"DoD has a framework of doing penetration testing and doing their own vulnerability assessment, but this is in the constraints of federal government,” Chung said. "So our gut feeling was that bringing in private sector practices would show that there were more vulnerabilities that hadn't been found.”

The project actually started in April 2016, Futurism reports. Since then, the DoD also started a new campaign called “Hack the Army” and “Hack the Air Force.”

The results of the campaigns include thousands of vulnerabilities found and addressed, which should go a long way towards making the secrets of the U.S. government much safer. The infrastructure behind the Bug Bounty program also appear to be streamlined and efficient, so everything from the disclosure of the flaws to fixing them is done effectively.