Credit to our white-hats

Pakistan is just beginning to wake up to realities of cybercrime. It is hoped our White-Hats can rise to the challenge

Hackers — people who make a habit of burgling other peoples computers and security systems — come in all shapes and sizes, with those who are malicious in their intent being called ‘Black Hats’ and those who are rather more benign ‘White Hats’. They tend to be at the top end of the Uber-Geek spectrum, young, predominantly but not exclusively male, and sometimes prodigiously good at what they do. So good that large and prestigious corporations and global entities with a heavy reliance of information technology and an awareness of the vulnerabilities thereof, often employ them to test the security of their systems on a rolling basis.

Pakistan has its share of both black and white-hatted hackers, and one of them, a 21-year-old called Rafay Baloch has just identified and written the code for a fix of a major security flaw in the Google Android operating system, which sits at the heart of millions of smartphones worldwide. The bug allows access to private data which can be either sold-on to criminal networks or used to exploit the victim’s computer activity — online banking and credit and debit card purchases for instance. Baloch earns his living as a cyber-bug bounty hunter. He was awarded $10,000 and had the offer of a job from PayPal for detecting vulnerabilities in the online payment system, but it seems he is to get no reward for his efforts — which will have saved Google and Android from a potentially damaging attack — because Android does not have a vulnerability rewards programme, and Baloch does not qualify under the Android Patch Rewards Programme either, which seems unfair to say the very least.

The Google representative in Pakistan has not returned calls regarding this matter and it seems that this is one White-Hat who is not going to get his just reward. Pakistan is just beginning to wake up to the realities of cybercrime, with our systems and networks no less vulnerable to criminal hackers than anywhere else in the world. It is to be hoped that our White-Hats will be able to rise to the challenge.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 21^st, 2014.

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