Did you know that there are different types of hackers? White hats are protecting the systems and crypto assets against black hats who, in turn, try to sneak into the system and steal personal or corporate data. Moreover, there are also grey hackers who make their living doing both white and black hacking. On the one hand, they are voluntary looking for the vulnerabilities in company’s systems. On the other hand, they try to take advantage of the found vulnerabilities for personal, malicious, use. Usually, grey hats blackmail companies in return for not uncovering compromising information about them.
In April, the French ICO project NapoleonX faced such a threat. An unknown hacker who “worked for several cyber-protection companies” claimed that he had found a severe vulnerability in project’s security system. He threatened to sell sensitive information to third parties unless being paid.
The founders didn’t want to pay to the malefactor and immediately contacted Hacken to answer adequately. The Hacken team launched an urgent bug bounty program and confirmed that there was no such vulnerability mentioned by the blackmailer.
The story has a happy ending. Nevertheless, there are two significant lessons to learn. First of all, a black hat hacker can be smarter than one, but they cannot be smarter than the united community of white hats. Secondly, as long as HackenProof, decentralized bug bounty platform, exists, you should never go on about blackmailers.
Drop a line to Hacken if you have been subjected to blackmail by a hacker or have any cybersecurity issue!