There are two kinds of hackers, without going into specifics, think of them as the good and the bad hackers. The good hackers look for vulnerabilities and then report them to the companies responsible so that they can be fixed while the bad ones exploit those vulnerabilities for their own gains. Avicoder is one of the good hackers and was able to download the entire source code of Twitter’s popular video sharing service Vine.
Avicoder was looking at multiple ways to breach Vine’s security and that’s when he came across a domain which enabled him to recreate a local version of Vine. In the wrong hands, this vulnerability would have caused a lot of headache to the engineers who work on Vine’s code but lucky for them, he’s one of the good guys who has helped fix many Twitter bugs in the past.
Once he reported the bug to Vine and showed them the full exploitation, the bug was fixed within five minutes, it goes without saying that Vine engineers rushed to plug the hole that could have done a lot of damage and they were certainly grateful that it was brought to their attention.
For all his help in discovering this vulnerability, avicoder was awarded a $10,080 bounty. You see, it pays to be one of the good guys.
Filed in . Read more about Vine. Source: thenextweb