The word hacker is mostly used to notoriously describe a cybercriminal. But in fact, not all Hackers are bad, as they are also the good guys.

Also called the white Hat Hackers as opposed to black hat hackers, white hat hackers are those hackers who specialize in penetration testing and in other testing methodologies that ensures the security of an organization's information systems.

When they breach a system, they don't steal or do anything malicious. Instead, they will notify the owner of the system. And they do that, often to earn bounty rewards. This is why white hat hackers are also known as ethical computer hackers, or simply computer security experts.

So here, while hacking in general may still have a negative connotation in many people's minds. Still, there is a number of hackers who are using their skills to help corporations and governments

And this time for the first time ever, a white hat hacker has earned $2 million in bug bounties on HackerOne, the U.S.-based vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform.

The Romanian Cosmin Iordache or 'inhibitor181' was already among the high rankings of hackers with the most bounties tied to their names.

Before reaching the $2 million milestone, Iordache managed to earn $300,000 in the past three months alone.

Iordache has been living in Germany with his wife, and started having an interest in hacking when he attending a HackAttack seminar in Hamburg in mid-2016 while he was still in university. This led him to switch his job from a full-stack developer and became a bug bounty hunter starting in late 2017.

It was only two years later in 2019, that Iordache was crowned as The Assassin at the Singapore h1-65 live hacking event. He managed to secure that same title in London at the 2019 h1-4420 live hacking event.

In all, Iordache has found a total of 468 vulnerabilities in companies and passed them on via HackerOne.

These are bugs at large companies such as Verizon Media, PayPal, Dropbox, Facebook, Spotify, AT&T, TikTok, Twitter, Uber, and GitHub, as well as a handful of bugs reported to the U.S. Department Of Defense.

It should be noted that Iordache earned all of these rewards only through HackerOne, and not from bounties outside that platform.

HackerOne took this moment to congratulated the bug bounty hunter on Twitter.

With his achievement, Iordache is ranked as high as other notable white hat hackers, like Argentinian Santiago Lopez who was the first millionaire hacker in 2019, after he was inspired by the Hackers film.

HackerOne said that until this time and so far, only 9 bug bounty hunters have earned $1 million on the platform, with Jon Colston being the ninth hacker to reach this goal after reporting over 170 vulnerabilities in government and enterprise organizations.

Besides Santiago Lopez and Cosmin Iordache, other millionaire hackers on the platform include Mark Litchfield from the UK, Nathaniel Wakelam from Australia, FransRosen from Sweden, Ron Chan from Hong Kong, Tommy DeVoss from the U.S, and Eric from Canada.

Since founded in 2012, HackerOne has grown into a popular bug bounty program, and has also helped hackers report vulnerability reports to bug bounty programs.

Until this time, 700,000 ethical hackers are on HackerOne's bug bounty program, and they have all collectively found approximately 170,000 security bugs in the products of almost 2,000 HackerOne customers.

12% of HackerOne hackers make over $20,000 each year only from bug bounties, while 1,1% will earn rewards worth over $350,000 annually and 3% over $100,000 per year.

The bug bounty platform announced that $100,000,000 in rewards were earned by ethical hackers as of May 26, 2020.