A
man from Madhya Pradesh’s Indore turned a millionaire by detecting bugs in the
applications made by Google, Samsung, and Apple.

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Aman
Pandey, a cybersecurity researcher, started a company “Bugsmirror”
after he was rewarded with Rs 70000 by Google for finding a bug in one of their
applications in 2019, while he was still studying.

Speaking
to ANI, Aman said, “I along with the Co-founder of “Bugsmirror”,
Manas, have found more than 600 bugs in various applications of Google, and the
company has paid us crores of rupees in return. We have also found bugs in the
applications of companies like Samsung and Apple.”

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Bugsmirror
received $8.7 million as part of Google’s Vulnerability Reward Programme (VRP) in
2021.

Pandey’s
company is now getting business contracts from Indian companies as well.
“Till now we had only international clients but now Indian customers are
also coming to us for security audits of their products,” he said.

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The
startup has 15 employees, including two founders.

Top researcher

In
a blog post, Google has rated Aman as one of the top researchers of the tech
giant’s Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) last year. Pandey uncovered and
submitted 232 vulnerabilities in Android just last year. He had been reporting
flaws since 2019 and has so far submitted over 280 valid vulnerabilities to the
Android program, according to the blog post.

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Most
tech companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and others pay researchers for
any ‘bugs’ or software flaws that these researchers can locate in their
products. The rewards are popularly called ‘Bugs bounty.’

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“I
have been working on security research for almost four years now. And the
Bugsmirror team’s incessant passion and hard-work towards security research has
helped us to indigenously design and develop applications embedded with
algorithms. These helped us locate vulnerabilities at an unmatched speed and
accuracy. Programs like this (Google’s) helped not just research companies like
ours, but even general users in understanding the importance of privacy and
security research,” Pandey was quoted as saying by the Indian Express.