Aurora Rewards $6 Million to Ethical Hacker

Aurora just rewarded an ethical hacker known as pwning.eth with $6 million for submitting a bug through bug bounty platform Immunefi. $6 million is the highest bounty listed for critical level smart contract bugs on Aurora. The bug could have reportedly allowed a malicious user to mint new ETH and drain over 70,000 ETH. Thanks to the bug report, Aurora was able to address the vulnerability before any malicious activity could take place.
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Aurora is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) created by the team behind NEAR Protocol. Like many tech companies, Aurora offers a bug bounty program that rewards reported bugs by threat level. The bug bounty payouts range from $1,000 for low level smart contract threats up to $6 Million for critical smart contract threats. Bounties are also offered for website and applications bugs and threats.

Ethereum also has a Bug Bounty Program place and allows top users to earn up to $250,000 for critical bugs and place on the leaderboard.

Compared to crypto bug bounties, non-crypto big tech companies like Meta and Google also have bug bounty programs. Meta’s top payout is for $40,000, while Google rewards up to $1,000,000 for top Android and Google Device exploits. Google also has bounties for their other products including Chrome, Google Play, and other security centered bounty programs. Crypto bounties involving smart contracts are usually large due to the amount of people and money that it could affect when exposed to critical vulnerabilities.