Katie Moussouris Wants Us to Pay Hackers to Find Our Bugs

Katie Moussouris is on a mission to convince the government that security research is vital to keeping us all safe. It’s a tough sell when research and hacking can look so much alike. But she has achieved the impossible before: She got Microsoft to launch a “bug bounty” program in 2013 to pay researchers for security flaws they find in its software. Now, as chief policy officer for HackerOne, she helps other firms broker negotiations with researchers who want to report bugs rather than exploit them or sell the info to nefarious buyers. To date, HackerOne has helped squash more than 10,000 bugs, including glitches in the code of Twitter, Yahoo, WordPress, and Dropbox.