HackerOne's Mårten Mickos
Hacker-Powered Security

Mårten Mickos is one of the most respected members of the open source world. The former CEO of MySQL AB during its prime now serves as the CEO of HackerOne, a vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform. I sat down with Mickos to understand HackerOne's purpose and his perspective on the security of open source software.
Mårten Mickos is one of the most respected members of the open source world. The former CEO of MySQL AB during its prime now serves as the CEO of HackerOne, a vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform. I sat down with Mickos to understand HackerOne's purpose and his perspective on the security of open source software.
HackerOne's Role
In layman's terms, HackerOne brings the hacker community to an organization to hack into their code in search of vulnerabilities. As Mickos said, "Sometimes we joke that if you are going to be hacked anyway, it's better to get hacked by someone you can trust." HackerOne has built a platform for secure intelligence report sharing and payment, along with a reputation system for hackers.
When an organization announces a bug bounty program through HackerOne, the hacker community starts looking at the organization's code and filing their reports. The platform enables the bug bounty program's organizer to vet these vulnerabilities. The hacker who filed the report gets rewarded.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Blender App Makes it to the Big Screen
The animated film "Flow" won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards held on March 2, 2025 and Blender was a part of it.
-
Linux Mint Retools the Cinnamon App Launcher
The developers of Linux Mint are working on an improved Cinnamon App Launcher with a better, more accessible UI.
-
New Linux Tool for Security Issues
Seal Security is launching a new solution to automate fixing Linux vulnerabilities.
-
Ubuntu 25.04 Coming Soon
Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) has been given an April release date with many notable updates.
-
Gnome Developers Consider Dropping RPM Support
In a move that might shock a lot of users, the Gnome development team has proposed the idea of going straight up Flatpak.
-
openSUSE Tumbleweed Ditches AppArmor for SELinux
If you're an openSUSE Tumbleweed user, you can expect a major change to the distribution.
-
Plasma 6.3 Now Available
Plasma desktop v6.3 has a couple of pretty nifty tricks up its sleeve.
-
LibreOffice 25.2 Has Arrived
If you've been hoping for a release that offers more UI customizations, you're in for a treat.
-
TuxCare Has a Big AlmaLinux 9 Announcement in Store
TuxCare announced it has successfully completed a Security Technical Implementation Guide for AlmaLinux OS 9.
-
First Release Candidate for Linux Kernel 6.14 Now Available
Linus Torvalds has officially released the first release candidate for kernel 6.14 and it includes over 500,000 lines of modified code, making for a small release.