Posted on August 4, 2018 at 2:37 AM

Hack HP Printers for $10,000

HP has announced the launch of a new bug extermination program and is offering up to a whopping $10,000 to hackers who can free their printers of these pesky little critters. Earn yourself a hefty amount of cash and bring HP printer users around the world a little peace of mind (thank you!)

With the help of a community of hackers (no, hackers are not all criminals,) Shivaun Albright, HP’s chief technologist of print security, states that “HP is committed to engineering the most secure printers in the world.”

To do this, HP is joining forces with a well-known company that goes by the name of Bugcrowd to assess applications. Bugcrowd is a company comprised of hackers that are hired to expose and ultimately fix security threats to systems. Their job is to find and fix these vulnerabilities before the “bad guy hackers” are able to exploit their weaknesses.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where we saw it necessary to add internet connectivity to everything we could imagine, from outlet plugs to toilets, (seriously, check out Kohler’s Numi toilet,) not realizing that we were leaving ourselves vulnerable to more cyber threats than we’d like to handle.

In Bugcrowd’s 2018 State of Bug Bounty Report, the company noticed a major increase of 21% in vulnerabilities connected to endpoint devices over the past year. Endpoint devices are pretty much any device you can think of, ranging from desktops and laptops to smartphones and printers.

Though it may sound like we will all be affected by these well-hidden printer bugs, the focus appears to be more on enterprise printers, which has helped ease the minds of many home consumers. What we do have to worry about still is the low ink messages that annoyingly prevent us from printing a document that we know doesn’t require very much ink to begin with. I still don’t understand how ink cartridges can be at times just as expensive as certain printer model, and I fear that I may never fully understand the logic that printer companies seem to be using.

Now, back to the subject. If you’re interested in becoming “Bug Bounty Hunter,” HP says that awards will be starting at $500, and can reach as high as the previously stated $10,000. HP is also considering paying outside researchers who come across bugs that may have already been discovered by some of their internal researchers.

HP may even plan to extend the bounty hunter program to their PC’s but have yet to give a time frame on the possibility. If you’re a hacker looking for a challenge, with the perks of being paid, this may very well be just the job for you.