May 11, 2023

Marten Mickos, CEO, HackerOne, and Alex Rice, CTO and co-founder, HackerOne How do ethical hackers compare to in-house red teams, and what are some common misconceptions about engaging with ethical hackers? Two experts from HackerOne - Marten Mickos, CEO, and Alex Rice, CTO and co-founder - provide insights on why ethical hacking matters. For Rice, it is important for enterprises to get third-party perspectives on what they are missing or not seeing. Another aspect that often gets missed by organizations is the diversity that ethical hackers bring to the table. "If you hire 10 security experts, you don't get diversity. If you hire 100, you have a higher diversity, but it's costing you millions," Mickos said. "But we come with 1.7 million ethical hackers who have the diversity, and you don't need to hire them all full-time. You hire just the thing you need at that moment. And this machinery of diversity is what distinguishes ethical hackers from in-house experts." In this video interview with Information Security Media Group at RSA Conference 2023 , Mickos and Rice also discuss: The latest AI tools and whether they can ever replace ethical hackers; Best practices for engaging with ethical hackers; How ethical hackers are different from in-house experts. Mickos previously served as CEO of MySQL AB. Prior to that, he led Eucalyptus Systems and held leadership roles at Nokia and Hewlett-Packard. Throughout his career, he has acted as an adviser to many organizations. Rice is responsible for developing the HackerOne technology vision, driving engineering efforts and counseling customers as they build world-class security programs. He previously worked at Facebook, where he founded the product security team, built one of the industry's most successful security programs and introduced new transport layer encryption.