Nintendo Will Pay You Up To $20k To Hack The Switch And 3DS

Nintendo wants to make sure the Switch and 3DS are as secure as possible, and it's turning to a community of "white-hat hackers" to find any vulnerabilities. The company has taken out a listing on HackerOne, a "bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure platform," asking for reports on those two systems only.

In exchange, Nintendo is offering a "bounty" of up to $20,000 for new information on any of the following:

• Piracy
• Cheating
• Dissemination of inappropriate content to children
• System vulnerabilities regarding Nintendo Switch
• Vulnerabilities regarding Nintendo-published applications for Nintendo Switch
• System vulnerabilities regarding the Nintendo 3DS family of systems

So how much exactly will you get for a valuable tip? Nintendo says it depends on how important and useful the reported info is. It says, in general, "the importance of the information is higher if the vulnerability is severe, easy-to-exploit."

Hackers will have to show a proof of concept or functional exploit code, but if you don’t have that Nintendo is still encouraging you to "report to us sooner rather than later such that you do not to lose the opportunity to become the first reporter."

So far three people have reported vulnerabilities and received their bounties. How much, and what bugs they found, are kept secret.

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