$100,000 to hack Starlink: Elon Musk's SpaceX offering rewards for identifying security risks

SpaceX, the space technology company owned by Elon Musk, is offering up to $100,000 to ethical hackers who can find a flaw in the safety system of its satellite internet system, Starlink. The large reward is available through the company’s “bug bounty system”.

So far, security researchers have identified 43 bugs and the average reward over the last three months has been $913.75.

“We encourage researchers to test Starlink for security issues in a non disruptive way", the company said in a blog post, asking testersto report their findings through the company’s bug bounty system.

SpaceX stated that it gauges the impact of the bug by looking at several factors. The factors make an attempt to understand various things like whether the vulnerability can affect other infrastructure like satellites and centralised services, whether the bug allows access to restricted systems via the internet, closed networks, etc, whether the vulnerabilities allow attackers to affect the users of other system, how many devices can be accessed through the exploit, etc.

This initiative has been taken in an effort to understand and minimise any sort of security vulnerability in the Starlink system which could potentially lead to the network being hacked.

Starlink currently has over 7,000 satellites in low Earth orbit.