Hemanth,you should make a press statement that hacking is not in the engineering syllabus.
The request came in the form of a WhatsApp message from one of Hemanth Joseph’s friends, after his (the friend’s) mother scolded him for watching TV and not doing something worthwhile like bypassing an iPad’s security lock, like a certain other engineering student had done. It didn’t quite help that the student in question was Hemanth himself. A B Tech student from Pala, Hemanth is now a familiar name in every B Tech student’s house. This popularity came after he had bypassed Apple’s security lock in the iPad Air iOS v10.1. The incident was reported all over the world and catapulted him to fame. Now, he is a tech-star among the tech-savvy younger generation.
Bypassing Apple’s security is not his first achievement. For the last 4 years, he had reported around 40 security lapses to various companies, including the likes of Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AT&T, Pebble, Barracuda Labs, Nokia, Blackberry and also Microsoft. Some companies gave him a bounty for his vigil while others included him in their Hall of Fame for reporting critical vulnerabilities.
He has netted a cool `10 lakh till now with his ‘hacker’ talents. His first venture was reporting a bug in American telecommunication giant AT&T in 2013, while he was in his first year at college. AT&T gave him a bounty of $5,000. Hemanth is also the commander at Cyber Dome, Kerala Police’s cyber security wing. It is an honourary post given by Cyber Dome for his volunteer support to them. There are very few commanders in Cyber Dome. He is also the founder of India’s first open security community for students, SecCon (www.OSecCon.com). “I started it to help cyber security enthusiasts in the student community. When we attend meetings of professional cyber security experts we cannot understand what is going on. So I started OSecCon,” he says.
Reach Out: www.OSecCon.com