A Nigerian female hacker was recently rewarded for hacking the Dutch government. All thanks to the National Cyber Security Centre of Netherlands for this recognition!
Information is one of the most important organization assets. For an organization, information is valuable and should be appropriately protected. Security is to combine systems, operations and internal controls to ensure integrity and confidentiality of data and operation procedures in an organization.
In the case of Sophina Kio-Lawson, an Information Security Engineer and the Co-founder of SheSecures was rewarded for hacking the Netherlands government’s website.
Info. Security Engineer Sophina was involved in a hacking bounty program that leverages on different website‘s vulnerabilities thus alerting the endangered organisation to beef up security!
She posted this on her LinkedIn page with a caption; “Yes!! I hacked the Dutch government and all I got was a lousy T-Shirt to show for it ? Thanks to the National Cyber Security Centre – Netherlands for the recognition.”
Here’s a photo of the T-shirt and letter sent to her:
When we reached out to her, she stated… “The program is called a responsible disclosure — meaning hackers like myself get to use hacking for good instead of using it for criminal purposes. So they reward hackers either with cash, T-shirts, hall of fame, or just saying thank you through a bug bounty program.”
Sophina is one of the few Nigerian women creating awareness in cybersecurity and information security, her goal is to bring more young African women into information security. You should check out her co-founded organisation “shesecures.org‘ to get more insights into how you can secure your website from vulnerabilities online.
So there you go… I will leave you with this, no matter how big or small your organization is, there is utmost importance to get your data secure and avoid vulnerabilities at all cost.
