Secure your Business: White Hat Hackers

“White hat hackers”—digitally savvy good guys—have become critical to keeping businesses safe in a rapidly changing world of cyberattacks, ransomware, and security breaches.

White hat hackers are ethical hackers. They use their technical expertise to look for weaknesses and vulnerabilities in applications, networks, and online services. If a weakness or vulnerability is found, they confidentially report what they uncover to the company so that the vulnerability can be patched before the organization and/or its customers are victimized by cybercriminals.

Pay to play.

Most white hat hackers work on commission. A popular form of compensation is through so-called “bug bounty” programs in which money—a bounty—is paid as a reward for discovering and reporting vulnerabilities, or bugs.

Paying the white hats generous bounties is a good investment, compared to the high costs of cyber breaches—projected to total as much as $10.5 trillion annually by 2025—not to mention the damage done to reputations and customer goodwill. This is why security is so vital and has become a central focus for T-Mobile.

The problem of complexity and scope.

Why is fighting cybercrime so challenging? It’s due to the central role of digital communications in daily life and its increasing complexity. An Android operating system is one of the largest programs, with millions of lines of code in the operating system alone. Then there are all the third-party apps that users download, which make travel, work, and our daily lives easier, but also create new attack vectors for criminals.

It only takes a handful of bad actors to wreak havoc, compared to the legions of cybersecurity experts needed to watch for intrusions, react to attempted digital break-ins, and buttress a company’s digital defenses. Even the biggest in-house security teams with the most comprehensive programs can benefit from knowledgeable reinforcements.

By engaging white hat hackers in bug bounty programs, companies can effectively expand their computer security teams by orders of magnitude. White hat hackers are often involved in cutting-edge academic research or are computer experts in specialized fields such as digital forensics, spyware, or computer viruses.

Getting security conscious.

Enlisting white hats is an approach to cybersecurity that helps create a security-conscious culture throughout the company while detecting problems. At T-Mobile, when a vulnerability is discovered, entire departments are mobilized to patch the program and, just as crucially, information about the discovery is shared throughout the company.

Bug bounty programs can also encourage outside partners and vendors to be more security conscious. More importantly, bug bounty programs have the advantage of solving problems before they become widely recognized, which is why white hat hacking tends to include the unsung heroes of cybersecurity.

Who should enlist white hats?

How can you tell if white hats are right for you? The truth is, no company is too big or too small to realize the benefits.

Crowdsourced bug bounty companies allow businesses to scale such programs, making them more affordable as well as more responsive when the need arises. Businesses can also pay according to the severity of the vulnerability that’s uncovered. Established bug bounty companies also offer access to vetted white hat hackers and researchers who have proven their technological knowledge—as well as their trustworthiness.

THE AVERAGE COST OF A DATA BREACH is $4.5MM. Source: IBM. Cost of a Data Breach Report, 2023.

The bottom line is that companies of every size should consider the cost of not investing in a bug bounty program. Worldwide the average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.5 million. So offering a few thousand dollars to white hats is a small price to pay to protect your business and customers.

How to work with white hats: 3 key principles.

Based on our experience at T-Mobile, there are three important elements to consider when beginning a bug bounty program: how to attract the best talent, how to retain that talent, and how to be responsive to that talent.

Pay top dollar.

To attract experts in cybersecurity, your company must be willing to pay top dollar for the discovery of serious vulnerabilities that might threaten your business.
Be clear with the white hat community how, what, and when you’ll pay for bug bounties.

Keep talent engaged.

Keep that talent engaged. To do that, you need to build a community.
Hacking competitions or one-off challenges can keep ethical hackers focused on a company’s business.
Consider creating a loyalty program with additional benefits for regular contributors.

Be responsive.

Finally, be responsive to white hat reports. There’s little use in launching a bug bounty program if you don’t fix the problems it discovers.
If ethical hackers see a company isn’t fixing problems they uncover, they will go public with their findings and move on to other clients.

Programs that deploy white hat hackers are likely to expand in the future rather than shrink. As a prime example, AI programs and the rush to use such algorithms in everything from travel sites to healthcare is generating a greater need for such security measures. Microsoft has instituted a new bug bounty program aimed at its AI-equipped version of Bing, for example. OpenAI pays up to $20,000 to white hats who discover serious vulnerabilities in ChatGPT.

Such high-visibility programs are a sign of how important a role white hat hackers play in identifying, analyzing, and mitigating cybersecurity threats, ultimately contributing to the overall security of digital systems. And it’s why T-Mobile is at the cutting edge of enlisting such experts. White hats may no longer ride into town on white horses, but you want them on your side in a digital frontier where we face more black hats every day.