Uncle Sam wants you to
"hack the Pentagon" — and is now recruiting savvy web-breaching experts to bolster government cybersecurity.
In a promotion for the "first-ever federal bug bounty" program in
Tech Crunch, Chris Lynch, the director of the
U.S. Digital Service's $150,000 program for the Department of Defense, says registration began March 31 to invite "white hat hackers… to come help us better secure our technology and war fighters."
By the day after the announcement, "we had over 500 registrations with over 10 qualified hackers signing up per hour," he writes.
According to Lynch, in 2012 alone, Defense public websites had 4 billion visits — and 25 percent of them "were nefarious in some way."
"Think about that — a billion attempts to undermine security," he writes. "And that's just a couple of websites. It's a mind numbing challenge that we have to step up to."
But, Lynch added, "We built the concept and program … to provide a new way to let Americans help make us all safer at the end of the day."
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