Nintendo wants to know about all those neat tricks that people have been using to hack the 3DS consoles; and it is prepared to pay good money for them. A surprise posting through HackerOne notes that the Japanese company is prepared to shell out between $100 and $20,000 (about RM440 to RM88,000) per vulnerability discovered.
It would appear that Nintendo is primarily interested in discovering how to stop people from pirating games. The real question is why the company has taken so long to issue a bounty programme; which leads us to wonder if this is part of a wider effort to secure the upcoming Nintendo Switch instead.
That being said, the bounty also claims that Nintendo is interested in preventing cheating and inappropriate content from reaching children. The latter is to be expected from the family friendly company, while the former makes an interesting statement about Nintendo’s new direction.
The Switch’s reveal video indicated that Nintendo is looking to make some headway into the eSports scene, which would necessitate some additional anti-cheating measures.
One thing to note is that researchers who share their findings through the bounty programme are not allowed to disclose the information – ever. This is unusual for vulnerabilities; in most cases, the developer is given a couple of months to fix the problem before it is made public.
[Source: HackerOne]
