The Million-Dollar Hacker

this is a classic Nissan Skyline it might look like just another car but only one of these makes you an instant star among car enthusiasts and this guy's so rich he owns two of them he affords these luxuries not by toiling away at a nine-to-five job like the rest of us but by breaking into websites and getting paid for it my name is Tommy Davis and I'm a hacker [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the businesses tommy hacks are headquartered in cities like New York and San Francisco but Tommy works at a suburban Virginia and when I went to go see him over the summer he was crashing at his mom's place her kitchen doubled as his office most of the time if I tell somebody I'm a hacker the first thing they say is either really or no you're not because real hackers don't admit that their hackers do people think that you do it for bad reasons yeah people often like ask me hey I think my boyfriend's cheating on me can you help me break into his phone so I can find out but Tommy's not gonna break into your boyfriend's phone because all the hacking he does is legitimate in Arrangements called bug bounty programs companies like Verizon and General Motors pay him to look for security holes in their systems so they can fix them before the bad guys get in when you find one of the ones that you know is gonna be like five or ten thousand dollar payout it's justyou can feel your heart racing faster and it's just like doing drugs I don't want to go to in detail one comparison with that it's just you get that same sort of rush for some time now tech companies have employed legitimate hackers to test their systems but over the last decade or so bug bounty hunting has become much more organized thanks to the merchants of websites that match freelance hackers with businesses the prize money has now gotten big enough to make this an actual career what's the most money you've made on a bug a single report is $20,000 what about in a single day a single day one hundred and sixty thousand dollars in October of last year and I think that only took three or four hours worth of actually working so if you were to average it out how many hours a week would you say you work five to ten and and how much money have you earned over the last year this year six hundred and thirty six thousand dollars what do you think is the thing that makes you so good at it just the fact that I've been doing it for so long I thought Tommy was gonna be something like a lawyer or a doctor Tommy was very very smart and he was so much ahead of everybody else in the class in our classes you could play on the computers when you finished all your work I'd finished my work in ten minutes and then just go put on the computer it didn't take long for Tommy to fall in love with the internet and one day he stumbled into a chatroom or people talked about their illegal hacks they taught him their tricks and he started hacking for fun the first time he got caught was when he was in high school he was expelled spent a few weeks in juvenile detention and was ordered to stay away from computers but he didn't listen we got into NASA computers the US courts Department of Energy anybody that had huge budgets that should have had secure systems but didn't [Music] and he was caught once again but this time as an adult most of these right here they got in prison you got prison bars the razor wire a guard tower I've got the word hacker on my stomach and then VA in federal prison everything's geographical and I was from Virginia so Tommy served the total of about four years behind bars the judge told me if I get arrested for computers again and come to his court he was gonna give me life in prison and in 2010 right before his 27th birthday he got out for good for a long time the only jobs Tommy could get was cooks working in restaurants that was about it nobody would hire him because he was convicted felon but by 2016 a few bug bounty programs were up and running and Tommy gave it a try he explained it to his mom like this I got to hack again and that people were gonna pay me instead of sending me to prison she didn't believe me she was like are you sure you're not gonna get in trouble he's been in trouble three times for this and how am I supposed to know that he might not be tempted to do something again for most people bug bounty hunting is still more of a side gig than their primary source of income you get paid only when you're the first to report a bug and even those payouts don't amount to very much on one platform called hacker one the vast majority of her in less than $10,000 over time but if you're really good you can make a lot more out of hacker ones five hundred thousand contributors Tommy's among just six people who burned more than a milli dollars where all your money goes yeah my insurance appraised it at eighty nine thousand dollars you know your mom told me not to do this oh good [Music] the way this car vibrates does not feel safe to me is that vibrate Tom still gets the occasional speeding ticket but when it comes to computers he says he would never cross the line again kappa hug the prospect of spending the rest of my life away from my daughter there's nothing that can make that risk worth it you're gonna drive with that okay she's now the most important thing in the world instead of me you gotta push the button to start it already turn it this way I wanted to be a hacker but her mom wants her to be a dancer there you go I just think it'd be fun for getting her back together turn it this way a little bit no the other way don't run in today's car please don't hit Daddy's car please don't hit Daddy's car there you go good job she'll get anything in the road she wants its pound it it's gonna really end up costing me a lot more so I kinda have to hack a lot more I think as she gets older [Music] as more and more of the world moves online cyberattacks are only going to grow in frequency and sophistication in the havoc that the wreak on our lives [Music] and that means we're gonna need a lot more of the good kind of hackers testing our systems to make sure we're safe but Tommy won't pretend his motivations are all that noble the fact that we're securing the Internet it's a nice side effect but I do it for the money you

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 1,831,502

Rating: 4.9255509 out of 5

Keywords: News, bloomberg, hacking, technology, white hat, bug bounty, Next Jobs, career, future jobs, occupation

Id: icyTUMjlvMg

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Wadewatts80]

So Million dollar hacker and the guy lives with his mom. Kinda sounds like that vice story about luxury car rentals in a Miami with the guy who was full of shit.

[u/evilbotnet]

I met Tommy a few weeks back on a project. For all the hate in the comments here, he's a super chill and down to earth dude that knows his stuff. Willing to take other guys and show them what he knows and talk to them like they're equals. I won't speak on his background anymore than he did for Bloomberg, but he's been around the block for a long time.

Based on the handful of people I've met in the $500k+ club it seems like being successful is about understanding how to quickly ID the high payout vulns. I'm killing it on the low end vulns right now, but I'll never see a stable income from bug bounties until I start hitting SQLi, RCE, SSRF, etc.

[u/double-xor]

I find the “million dollar hacker” tiresome - there are many more security professionals who have earned $1M+ in the same time-frame just doing their day jobs, if measured “since the platform started connecting penetration testers wand security researchers”.

I get it - it’s cool. But there are also easy day jobs that can earn that over the same time-frame. There will always be rock stars in any field but it’s a bit disingenuous to suggest everyone can do this — because hardly anyone is actually willing to put in the work, practice hard, and come to the discipline with an extraordinary intuition for this type of problem-solving.

[u/RobKFC]

Interesting story, would like to have seen it be a little longer and discuss a little more of how he got into it all but it was still good.

[u/Phaetheon]

What's makes the top earners so good? Could I just learn the tricks of the trade and meet their ranks?

[u/[deleted]]

Oh damn was he using i3 with terminator?

[u/horsedonkeymonkey]

I think this guy works really really hard for the stuff he finds. The video over simplified his efforts IMHO... He seems very cool though! : D I also think most people aren't hating the person, but they're uncomfortable with how the video makes it seem like easy money :)

[u/caterpilows]

should i be a child prodigy with iq of 300 to be like this dude? because it seems that he is a child prodigy