Aditi Singh, a 20-year-old self-taught cybersecurity analyst has won a Microsoft Azure bug bounty of $30,000 which roughly translates to about Rs 22Lakhs.
And how did this happen?
Aditi found an RCE or a Remote Code Execution bug in Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform that can cause severe security impact. This bug allows miscreants to remotely execute a code from the target device which can essentially lead to machines getting locked up by ransomware or also lead to downloading of illegal content on a device.
Aditi’s professional journey has been quite out of the ordinary. She started off like everyone else in one of the private institutes in the country’s popular education hub, Kota, after giving her 10th Boards. She started preparing for her medical entrances but realised that she may not fare well owing to the level of competition depicted in the examinations.
“I joined Allen institute in Kota to prepare for medicals. I did not have any prior knowledge of computer science education and it has just been a year that I have started bug bounty hunting,” she said in her interaction with The Times of India, GadgetsNow.
The Bug Bounty career option has recently been picked up as a career option in India. Aspiring techies are venturing out into this lucrative field which looks quite promising in the years to come.
Her career in the tech world started out when she hacked an old WiFi system in her neighbourhood. She then went on to take up ethical hacking and has since then helped a number of companies resolve issues. These include the likes of Facebook, TikTok, Mozilla, Paytm and even Ethereum. She currently works as a Cyber Security Analyst for MapMyIndia, which is an Indian GPS and location-based services provider. She also holds a certification from the EC-Council.
Prior to finding this bug in Microsoft, she also won a bounty of $7,500 (Rs 5.5 Lakhs) from Facebook, a few months ago for finding a similar bug to the one she found recently.
Singh, in fact, reported this bug to Microsoft over a couple of months ago, however, received no acknowledgement. After a thorough investigation did Microsoft revert and award her a bounty of $30,000. Her approach towards learning computer science doesn’t necessitate getting a degree. She believes in making use of the available resources on the internet first in order to get in the field.
