Bengaluru hacker who earned over 2 crore finding bugs to start his own company
- Anand Prakash completed his engineering in Vellore Institute of technology, Chennai.
- In 2014, he joined Flipkart as a security intern.
- He learnt finding bugs using online resources and a lot of practice, he tells us.
FollowPrakash was born in Bhadra, Rajasthan and moved to Chennai for engineering at the Vellore Institute of Technology. In 2014, he joined Flipkart as an intern in Bengaluru.
During college, he interned with Cyber Crime Branch of Gurgaon police. However, Indian companies don't really have a bounty program, and the few that do are private. However, a Facebook post talking about a winner of a bounty program sparked his interest. With the massive interest in cyber-security, hordes of free resource online, he started reading accompanied by a lot of practice.
MNCs usually have the bug bounty programs, and in the past four years, he has discovered bugs in some of the popular companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Blackberry, SoundCloud and the latest one being Uber, among others. The bounty programs have fetched him approximately ₹2.2 crore in the past four years, which has now helped him start his new company.
By May 2016 he left Flipkart to work as an Independent cyber security researcher and has now added Flipkart as a vendor. "I found the Facebook bug while I still worked for Flipkart. There were no discrepancies. In fact, Flipkart was very proud of his achievements and never interfered in what he does at his free time," he tells us.
He plans to launch his new company, which already has about four employees onboard, in 2-3 months. The company would build their own product and also offer security services.
He has been acknowledged by Facebook and if you look at this list, he ranks 4th in 2017, 3rd in 2016 and 4th in 2015. Similarly, he's also acknowledged by Twitter and stands 3rd in the list of ethical hackers.
He recently won over ₹3 lakh for finding a bug in Uber that allowed anyone to take free rides for life. Attackers could have easily misused this by taking unlimited free rides, causing huge losses to Uber. The bug has now been fixed by the Uber team. Similarly, the Facebook bug he reported would have allowed malicious minds to access others Facebook accounts.
Image credit: Mukesh Rajpurohit
