InnoGames honors white hat hacker for his contribution to increased security in Forge of Empires

“Seeing my face building a Stone Age city in a game that my friends play is so cool,” said Batee5a. “I am incredibly proud to see my hard work be recognized and valued by a company I know and love, and I hope that seeing someone like me protecting the empire — and its software — inspires others to take their gaming to the next level and start hacking.”

InnoGames is one of numerous game companies that take a proactive approach to protect their resources and invite trusted hackers to identify potential security holes on their website and in their games. InnoGames offers a reward for qualified results.A monetary award is given to a hacker who reports a valid security hole to the company. Since 2019, InnoGames has secured more than 58 vulnerabilities with the help of 196 hackers like Batee5a, paying out a total of EUR 22,500 to hackers.

In addition to these incentives for hackers, InnoGames recently identified its most valuable hacker within the program and rewarded him with an avatar in the game. Players can now select the "image" of Batee5a from a range of avatars that they use to display their profiles in Forge of Empires.

Batee5a, an avid gamer himself, began informing InnoGames on HackerOne about security vulnerabilities in early 2019. Batee5a was selected as the recipient of this additional award due to the quality and precision of his vulnerability reports. He has discovered 31 security vulnerabilities so far and has been awarded almost EUR 12,000 in prize money by the program.

“We are delighted to award Batee5a with a personalized character in Forge of Empires for his outstanding work on our bug bounty program,” said Stefan Walter, Product Head at InnoGames. “Passionate, collaborative and fair, Batee5a is setting the standard for what it means to be a true gamer, going above and beyond to improve and win the game. The safety of our players and efficiency of our game is vital to InnoGames. With players of all ages around the world spending their time in our realms, having Batee5a and the HackerOne community on our side is a powerful addition to our defense.”

More information about Batee5a’s path to becoming the most valuable hacker for InnoGames and how InnoGames works with hackers to make its applications more secure can be found in this Q&A: https://www.hackerone.com/blog/innogames-models-avatar-after-top-ethical-hacker

Further information about InnoGames’ bug bounty program is available here: https://hackerone.com/innogames

About InnoGames

InnoGames is Germany’s leading developer and publisher of mobile and online games. The company based in Hamburg is best known for Forge of Empires, Elvenar and Tribal Wars. InnoGames’ complete portfolio encompasses seven live games and several mobile titles in production. Born as a hobby, InnoGames today has a team of 400 employees from more than 30 nations who share the passion of creating unique games that players across the globe enjoy for years.

About HackerOne

HackerOne is the #1 hacker-powered pentest & bug bounty platform, helping organizations find and fix critical vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. More Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 1000 companies trust HackerOne than any other hacker-powered security alternative. With more than 1,760 customer programs, including The U.S. Department of Defense, General Motors, Google, Goldman Sachs, PayPal, Hyatt, Twitter, GitHub, Nintendo, Lufthansa, Microsoft, MINDEF Singapore, Panasonic Avionics, Qualcomm, Starbucks, Dropbox, Intel, HackerOne has helped to find over 150,000 vulnerabilities and award more than $80M in bug bounties to a growing community of over 600,000 hackers. HackerOne is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in London, New York, the Netherlands, France and Singapore.