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Santiago Lopez – Ethical Hacker

  • Santiago Lopez

  • Ethical Hacker at HackerOne
  • $1 million earnings in 3 years

How does Santiago make money online?

Santiago is a freelance ethical hacker from Argentina. 

He helps companies find cybersecurity issues so they can fix them before bad guys take advantage. Those companies pay Santiago for his help.

Santiago connects with clients via a platform called HackerOne, and has worked with the likes of Verizon, Udemy, Airbnb, Uber, Twitter and the US government.

How much money does Santiago make?

HackerOne reported that Santiago was the first hacker on their platform to cross the $1 million bounty threshold in March of 2019.

He was only 19 years old at the time 🤯

Forbes reported that Santiago earned his first bug bounty – that’s a reward for finding an issue – in 2016 when he was only 16. So it took him approximately three years to earn $1 million from as an ethical hacker.

BBC News produced this feature on Santiago in March 2019:

What’s Santiago’s background?

Santiago told Forbes that he thought himself how to hack via books and online tutorials:

How does Santiago find clients?

It looks like Santiago finds all his clients via the HackerOne platform.

Big companies like Starbucks, Nintendo, and PayPal use that platform to task hackers with finding vulnerabilities in their systems, and usually offer a reward (or bounty) for doing so. 

Rewards can be anything from $50 to thousands of dollars.

What type of online business does Santiago have?

According to our framework Santiago has a freelance business, which would be considered a Level 2 online business.

Updated: October 5, 2020

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