United Pays out 1 Million Miles for Bug Report!

by Adam

Back in May when United announced that they were awarding up to 1 million miles as a bounty for security bugs. Well, not even two months later, they have already paid out!

UA Bug Bounty

From the Threatpost:

Jordan Wiens, who founded a security company in Florida called Vector 35 and not too long ago worked for a government contractor, submitted what he thought were a couple of “lame” bugs to United’s two-month-old bug bounty program—his first commercial bounty submission. The payoff was anything but weak.

“There were actually two bugs that I submitted that I were pretty sure were remote code execution, but I also thought they were lame and wasn’t sure if they were on parts of the infrastructure that qualified,” Wiens said. “My expectation was that they counted, but I figured they’d award me 50,000 miles or something smaller.”Instead, he got a message from United asking him to confirm his U.S. citizenship and whether the research was done on U.S. soil. “I was hoping this wasn’t a honeypot,” Wiens joked. “Two hours later, I got a message to check my account that I had gotten my million miles.

Check out their full post here for full details on the bugs Jordan submitted to the United Airlines bug bounty program.

 

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3 comments

dubaych July 14, 2015 - 7:03 pm

The big disconnect here is that, as a PR stunt, it is so far beyond any normal person’s understanding, that all us, uh, “humans” just shrug and think, “Well, another techy just got a ton of something I wish I had but I have NO idea what anyone’s talking about.” As an IT stunt, it was probably pretty successful, because a million of something that isn’t dollars is pretty cheap for a company that can make that something out of thin air.

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evan July 14, 2015 - 11:35 pm

That would be awesome if he could give a training course at FTU. i’m sure that got a few laughs!

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