The girl named Aditi Singh is a self-taught cybersecurity researcher and analyst and is currently working for MapMyIndia. However, she was able to spot a critical RCE (Remote Code Execution) in the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform. Although details about the bug remain under wraps, Singh was awarded a hefty amount of $30,000 for her find. Singh, who enrolled in one of the private institutes in Kota to prepare for the Indian competitive exams, is essentially a self-taught cybersecurity researcher. She used various resources from online platforms to expand her knowledge about programming and cybersecurity. “I joined Allen Institute in Kota to prepare for medicals. I did not have any prior knowledge of computer science education and it has just been a year that I have started bug bounty hunting,” Singh said in a recent interview. In fact, she admits that she got the job at MapMyIndia without a graduation degree. She “hacked her way” to get her first job as a cybersecurity analyst in the company. “While digging through several platforms, I found some vulnerabilities on MapMyIndia. I reached out to them and managed to get hired without even a graduation degree”, said Singh in an interview after receiving the Microsoft bug bounty. So, given her career story, Singh thinks that one does not need a computer science degree to about programming and cybersecurity. She says there is a lot of educational resources available online for free that one can use to expand their knowledge. As a word of advice for aspirants looking for bug bounty jobs, she said, “You don’t need to be an IITian for bug bounty [programs]. It is quite easy if you are smart enough to search the internet. If anyone wants to get into ethical hacking then they should start with Javascript or Python and later get a certificate course in ethical hacking.”
