Amit Diwan/New Delhi

Aditi Singh, a 20-year-old self-taught ethical hacker from Delhi, has won a reward of $30,000 -approximately Rs 22 lakh - for spotting a bug in Microsoft’s Azure cloud system.

Got $30k bounty from Microsoft
Bug type: RCE#bugbounty #msrc #Microsoft #cybersecurity #infosec pic.twitter.com/lzp1cjwSLT

— Aditi Singh (@aditi_singghh) June 27, 2021

 Aditi had found a similar bug in Facebook just two months back and won a bounty of $7500 (approximately over Rs 5.5 lakh). Through such bugs, hackers can get access to internal systems and poach on the internal information they hold.

Aditi notes that it is not easy to spot bugs and ethical hackers have to stay on top of their game about new bugs, so they can report about them and still be eligible for their payouts.

Bug bounty hunters are mostly certified cybersecurity professionals or security researchers who crawl the web and scan the systems for bugs or flaws through which hackers can sneak in and alert the companies. If they are successful, they are rewarded with cash. She is employed as a hacker by the Microsoft and each time she or someone else finds a bus, the company rewards them.

Aditi has been into ethical hacking for the past two years. Her first hacking incident was when she managed to hack into her neighbour’s Wi-Fi password.

She then took an interest in ethical hacking when she was preparing for her medical entrance exam, NEET. While she didn’t get through medical school, she did find bugs in over 40 companies including Facebook, TikTok, Microsoft, Mozilla, Paytm.