Monday, May 5, 2025
Homecyber securityHackerOne Apologized to Ukrainian Hackers After Blocking their Bounty Payouts

HackerOne Apologized to Ukrainian Hackers After Blocking their Bounty Payouts

Published on

SIEM as a Service

Follow Us on Google News

After sanctions were imposed on Russia and Belarus after Ukraine’s invasion, the CISO of HackerOne, Chris Evans, apologized to Ukrainian hackers for blocking their bug bounty payouts.

Bug bounty platform, HackerOne is blocking the bug bounty rewards, in some cases thousands of dollars, and rejecting the Ukrainian hackers to withdraw their earnings.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February, HackerOne has blocked payouts to several hackers and researchers with affected HackerOne accounts due to all the economic sanctions and export controls that are imposed; however, all these imposed sanctions are not applicable to them.

- Advertisement - Google News

In this event, HackerOne notified all the bounty hunters from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus that all their transactions had been paused.

Apart from this, one of the Belarusian hackers claimed from its Twitter handle “xnwup” that “HackerOne took $25k from me because I am a Belarusian citizen.”

Here’s what HackerOne stated:-

“Due to current economic sanctions and export controls, if you are based in Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus, all communications and transactions (including swag shipping) have been paused for the time being.”

The HackerOne bug bounty program paid out more than $107 million in 2020 alone to all eligible bounty hunters. However, here the most vital point, in this case, is the dependency of several security researchers on their earnings to support their families.

Roleplay of HackerOne CEO

Earlier this week, HackerOne CEO Mårten Mickos brought up the freeze of Ukrainian accounts on the bug bounty platforms, saying that all rewards for hackers from sanctioned areas would go to UNICEF.

However, later, he deleted his tweet and published a new tweet in which he claimed that he misspoke the above statement, as he intended to say:-

“We re-route hacker rewards to donations only on specific instruction by the hacker.”

But, the CISO of HackerOne, Chris Evans, has published an official apology statement:-

“On behalf of the HackerOne team, I’d like to apologize to the Ukrainian hacker community for the frustration and confusion that our poor communication has caused. We have not (and will not) block lawful payments to Ukraine.”

Moreover, after this incident, HackerOne’s CISO, Chris Evans, also asserted that they would publish a FAQ page within 24 hours to brief this incident in detail.

You can follow us on LinkedinTwitterFacebook for daily Cybersecurity and hacking news updates.

Gurubaran
Gurubaran
Gurubaran is a co-founder of Cyber Security News and GBHackers On Security. He has 10+ years of experience as a Security Consultant, Editor, and Analyst in cybersecurity, technology, and communications.

Latest articles

Gunra Ransomware’s Double‑Extortion Playbook and Global Impact

Gunra Ransomware, has surfaced as a formidable threat in April 2025, targeting Windows systems...

Hackers Exploit 21 Apps to Take Full Control of E-Commerce Servers

Cybersecurity firm Sansec has uncovered a sophisticated supply chain attack that has compromised 21...

Hackers Target HR Departments With Fake Resumes to Spread More_eggs Malware

The financially motivated threat group Venom Spider, also tracked as TA4557, has shifted its...

RomCom RAT Targets UK Organizations Through Compromised Customer Feedback Portals

The Russian-based threat group RomCom, also known as Storm-0978, Tropical Scorpius, and Void Rabisu,...

Resilience at Scale

Why Application Security is Non-Negotiable

The resilience of your digital infrastructure directly impacts your ability to scale. And yet, application security remains a critical weak link for most organizations.

Application Security is no longer just a defensive play—it’s the cornerstone of cyber resilience and sustainable growth. In this webinar, Karthik Krishnamoorthy (CTO of Indusface) and Phani Deepak Akella (VP of Marketing – Indusface), will share how AI-powered application security can help organizations build resilience by

Discussion points


Protecting at internet scale using AI and behavioral-based DDoS & bot mitigation.
Autonomously discovering external assets and remediating vulnerabilities within 72 hours, enabling secure, confident scaling.
Ensuring 100% application availability through platforms architected for failure resilience.
Eliminating silos with real-time correlation between attack surface and active threats for rapid, accurate mitigation

More like this

Gunra Ransomware’s Double‑Extortion Playbook and Global Impact

Gunra Ransomware, has surfaced as a formidable threat in April 2025, targeting Windows systems...

Hackers Exploit 21 Apps to Take Full Control of E-Commerce Servers

Cybersecurity firm Sansec has uncovered a sophisticated supply chain attack that has compromised 21...

Hackers Target HR Departments With Fake Resumes to Spread More_eggs Malware

The financially motivated threat group Venom Spider, also tracked as TA4557, has shifted its...