Rohit Kumar, a second year student of BCA (Hons) of School of Computer Application, Lovely Professional University (LPU) was invited to participate in the two-day security conference, ‘BountyCon’ organised jointly by Facebook and Google in Singapore on March 30 and 31. Rohit is one of the few security researchers from Asia-Pacific who has been invited for the conference.

Rohit is one of India’s foremost ethical hackers and was included in the ‘Facebook-Hall of Fame’, amongst world’s top 20 Security Researchers in 2018. He has received a direct invite from Zach Turk, security program manager of Facebook (US) to join BountyCon. He has earned several bounties over the years for his exceptional work in bug detection from companies like Facebook, IMGUR, Invision and Shopify.

BountyCon 2019 has been organised jointly by Facebook and Google with an aim to identify upcoming security researchers in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as to incentivise their existing bug bounty community. The two-day invitation-only event will feature some of the top bug hunters like Rohit from the programmes run by both Facebook and Google, who will share practical tips for discovering and reporting high-quality vulnerabilities.

“BountyCon 2019 is one of the biggest security conferences happening in Asia-Pacific. I am delighted to be invited for it and look forward to sharing my learnings with other security researchers. Any organisation that holds confidential data and is serious about protecting it should consider bug bounty programmes to enhance their security efforts,” said Rohit.

With a keen interest in ethical hacking, Rohit joined LPU’s BCA (Hons) programme, School of Computer Application in 2018. The programme enabled him to burnish his passion and he managed to establish a strong presence amongst the global security researchers’ community in just two years. Entrepreneurial by nature, Rohit is currently running two start-ups at LPU, Coldfox is incubated from world’s leading startup incubator and investor group-‘YCombinator’.

“At LPU, we work towards identifying the hidden potential of students right from day one. Seeing his deep interest in ethical hacking, Rohit was exposed to cyber security experts during guest lectures and workshops and was also provided ample opportunities to participate in Hackathons. It feels great to see him do so well already, in the field of security research”, said Ashwani Tewari, dean, School of Computer Application.

LPU’s School of Computer Application offers an innovative pathway programme for undergraduate and postgraduate students wherein students are identified for a particular pathway (Placement, Research, Higher education & Entrepreneurship) and specialised inputs are provided by experienced faculty that have published a number of research papers in national and international journals. Every student is also assigned a personal mentor who helps groom them and helps them in excelling in their areas of interest / expertise.

Promoted in 2005, Lovely Professional University (LPU) is India’s premier multidisciplinary private university that houses students from over 50 countries in its sprawling 600 acre campus located on the outskirts of Jalandhar, Punjab.