This 20 year old Indian girl gets awarded INR 22 lakhs by Microsoft for finding a bug

How often were you amazed by films and web series that show a super-intelligent coder, paving his way through a difficult but mandatory hacking procedure, to track down the antagonist of the plot?  Such scenes in which the monitor shows a huge list of data and infographics, as the coder continuously glides his fingers through the keyboard and after employing a series of algorithms- shouts Eureka! Have found it! - gives rise to a sense of awe within us. Isn't it?

A bright 20-year-old Delhi-based ethical hacker Aditi Singh, figured out how to discover the real-life antagonist, an RCE bug in Microsoft's Azure cloud system, and was rewarded with a stupendous amount by the firm for her over the top accomplishment. 

This isn't the first time that Aditi has made such a breakthrough in bug-tracking in robust systems. Two months ago, she had discovered a comparable RCE bug in Facebook and was gifted with an abundance of Rs 5.5 lakh.  

Remarkably talented and a self-taught ethical hacking engineer, earlier on finding a bug in MapmyIndia, she was immediately taken on board by the company even without any college degree!

How harmful is the newly discovered RCE bug?

As per Aditi, both the companies had a remote code execution (RCE) bug, which is a comparatively new loophole in the software, and hence developers aren't giving it a lot of consideration apparently. Such bugs are the key for hackers to enter the internal systems and extract all the private data stored within those frameworks.

The surprising element is that the RCE bug in Microsoft Azure was, as a matter of fact, found by Aditi two months back, and immediately the company was notified about it. However, she didn't receive a prompt reaction from the company officials as they were holding back to check whether anybody had downloaded the unreliable variant of the framework.

How did she become the best in the business? 

It has been two years since Aditi began with her quest in the domain of ethical hacking. Her first personal feat was cracking her neighbor’s WiFi password, which further fueled her interest in coding and motivated her to pursue it as a career.  

She claims to have discovered bugs in the systems of close to fifty companies including Facebook, Tiktok, Microsoft, Mozilla, Paytm, Ethereum, and HP. 

Her work and achievements also received appreciation letters from Harvard University, Columbia University, Stanford University, and the University of California. What else? Aditi has likewise been featured in the Google hall of fame.

What does Aditi have to say?

• Aditi Singh especially emphasizes the fact that it's difficult to spot bugs and that ethical programmers need to keep steady over their game about new bugs, so they can report about them and still qualify for their payouts.
• Aditi, in any case, likewise stresses the importance of gaining knowledge on a particular subject. Hence, she strongly suggests acquiring proper information and training in the domain of ethical hacking instead of focussing on bringing in cash. This is anyways true as knowledge attracts the potential to acquire all the richness of the world. Isn't it?
• She also aptly elucidates the RCE bug and advises all the programmers and ethical hackers to download a Node Package Manager (a section of GitHub) prior to composing any algorithm and directly running the code.

"If you have proper access to Google and Twitter, you can learn everything about ethical hacking through various resources and open-source codes available on these platforms like Hacker One", said Aditi.

Individuals inspired by ethical hacking can discover numerous assets accessible on the web. She added that to get into cutting-edge hacking, one should be well-versed with a programming language like Python or JavaScript. She also proposed an online certificate course OSCP, for aspiring and bubbling ethical hackers.

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