This Cryptocurrency Exchange is Paying Hackers for Breaking its Security Protocols

Hackers of the world: Crime doesn’t pay; but in Brazil, cryptocurrency exchanges surely do.

BitcoinTrade, the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in Brazil, has just announced a partnership with BugHunt to create a program that encourages hackers to find bugs and errors on its platform and report them in exchange for money.

The idea has two main goals. On the one hand, it seeks to improve the quality standards of BitcoinTrade. On the other, it expects to promote the white hat hacking scene – those hackers who use their skills for legal purposes.

Brazil’s major data leaks are raising many alarms among the people

BitcoinTrade’s decision comes on the heels of recent alarming news for Brazil’s cybersecurity industry. Last week, the private data of more than 102 million Brazilians was leaked. What’s even worse, those databases are already being auctioned on the deep web. This security breach happened after an unidentified group of hackers attacked Brazil’s largest mobile services operators.

For context, Brazil’s total estimated population is around 211 million people. Even President Jair Bolsonaro’s private data is inside the leak.

And if this breach is surprising, a few days earlier, the financial information of 223 million consumers – both alive and dead – was leaked to the public after a group of anonymous hackers compromised the systems of Serasa Experian, the largest credit scoring organization in the country. In addition to personal data, demographic profiles, real estate holdings, education, earnings, tax information, vehicles purchased, etc., could also be found.

There is even a free version available for anyone containing the tax id, full names, and birthdays of almost every Brazilian with a bank account

Please, Hack me!

Concerns about potential security breaches are intensifying in the world of cryptocurrency trading, where transactions are irreversible, and users know that in the event of a hack, it is sometimes almost impossible to obtain compensation for damages. Even though crypto-related crimes are becoming less relevant, the risk is always there.

BitcoinTrade wants to minimize any possibility of an attack in order to maintain the peace of mind and trust of its customers. The program created along with BugHunt will pay on average R$10,000 ($1850) per flaw found. The amounts will fluctuate depending on the importance of the bug

Recently, BitcoinTrade was bought by Ripio, one of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms in Latin America. Ripio’s quality standards are very high, especially considering that it has a more global projection, serving clients in several countries, from Mexico to Argentina

In 2020, BugHunt paid more than R$ 100,000 to Brazilian hackers who found about 750 flaws in different corporations from all around Brazil. According to Caio Telles, president of BugHunt, their services manage everyting BitcoinTrade would need to improve its security:

In both services, we manage the definition of scope and reward, the choice of experts, the evaluation and screening of reports, and the verification and correction of service failures

Considering how easy it is to steal data from millions of brazilians, the crypto community will need as much support as possible, especially with a government that is not so fond on digital tokens at the moment.