Nintendo must be very pissed with the hackers and all for good reasons. Its system and games have been hacked many times. Recently, the game company has fought back against Pokemon Sun and Moon hackers. Now, it is sending another message to hackers that it is serious in strengthening its security by offering a $20K reward in exchange of information.
Before Pokemon Sun and Moon was released, pirated copies of the game began flooding the Internet and some players defiantly announced that they have gotten hold of the game. Nintendo answered by blocking these users from their online platform.
Now, it has launched a bounty program with a $20,000 reward or around £15,000 in exchange for information that points out the vulnerability of its handheld console, the Nintendo 3DS. The security vulnerabilities for the console include piracy through game application dumping, promoting content that is inappropriate for minors, and cheating methods, the most popular of which is saved data modification.
Aside from this, the game company is also investigating other potential risks and areas of vulnerabilities in both software and hardware. Software vulnerabilities might come through ARM11 kernel takeovers while hardware vulnerabilities might come via a security key detection.
Nintendo's bounty program range from $100 to $2000 depending on the type of vulnerability exposed. For those who are interested in getting the reward, they have to provide Nintendo with a detailed description of what the problem is. After that, they also need to present a proof-of-concept or a functional code. As for the code, Nintendo gives a three-week deadline for the submission of the code starting from when the initial report has been made.
The Nintendo bounty program was created by a security staff from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. It is hosted by a San Francisco-based security company called Hacker One.
