Elaine Ou, Columnist

Hacking a Company's Stock Price

People who discover vulnerabilities have a right to make a buck. But sometimes things get ugly.

September 12, 2016 at 2:30 PM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

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A security hole is a terrible thing to waste. If an exploit has the potential to affect a lot of people -- for example, a hack to break into an iPhone -- it could be quite a valuable asset.

Most of the time, security experts employ the principle of responsible disclosure. That means that somebody who discovers a security hole will allow the manufacturer to patch the flaw before telling everyone else about it. In exchange, the researcher gets a finder’s fee, or “bug bounty.”1473443425374