CHENNAI: Laxman Muthiyah is a bounty hunter who claims his reward without stepping out of his home in Sembakkam, Chennai. His hunting ground is the virtual world and his prey the bugs that bother Facebook, Instagram and most recently Microsoft.
In fact, Microsoft paid the 27-year-old self-taught independent security researcher Rs 36 lakh ($50,000), his highest bounty till date, for spotting vulnerability in the company’s online services that “might have allowed anyone to takeover any Microsoft account without consent”.
In 2019, Laxman won a bug bounty of $40,000 from Facebook for finding a similar account takeover vulnerability in Instagram. In the half-a-dozen years that he has been a bug spotter, Laxman has collected a bounty of around Rs 80 lakh from various tech giants. But Laxman is no child prodigy nor a geek from his school days. He finished schooling, scoring 80%, from Devakottai and Karaikudi in Sivaganga district and did his engineering from a college on Chennai’s outskirts.
The turning point was a workshop on ethical hacking Laxman attended at the Guindy College of Engineering in 2011. After that he focussed on learning about such programs. It helped that his family business was dealing in computer spare parts.
In 2013, while still in college, Laxman collected his first bounty of $4,500 (Rs 2.8 lakh) for identifying vulnerabilities in Facebook. He’s been at it ever since, except for a year as a web developer at a private firm fresh out of college.
“In the initial days, my family was worried as they could not understand what I was doing. When I quit my job after one year despite my employer offering to double my salary, my parents wondered what I was up to,” recalled Laxman.
And, it hasn’t been smooth sailing all the way, says Laxman. There was a lull of four years before he was able to identify a bug in Instagram in 2019, during which period he kept his spirits up by updating his skills and reading blogs by fellow security researchers. “On the work front, all those who can relate to what I do and can have a conversation about it are in the virtual world. Over time, I have come to terms with it,” said Laxman.
Google co-founder Larry Page is Laxman’s idol. He eventually wants to become an internet entrepreneur like Page.