A Lebanese ethical hacker has made a name for himself in the expansive cyber world, garnering recognition from dozens of giant companies, in addition to the U.S. Department of Defense.
Ahmad Halabi is a security researcher and penetration tester who works in security analysis, forensic investigation, in addition to software development and bug bounty hunting.
Halabi’s personal computer was hacked when he was 16 years old. The incident motivated him to explore the topic of hacking in order to understand the process and use it to improve his system’s immunity against potential future breaches.
He learned more through an online course that eventually led to him being recognized as a Certified Ethical Hacker by the International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants (EC-Council), which offers cybersecurity certification, education, training, and other cybersecurity-related services.
Since then, the 21-year-old hacker has managed to rank 1st in the U.S. Department of Defense’s Vulnerability Disclosure Program (VDP). He found 30 valid vulnerabilities in one of the U.S. Navy’s systems in under 24 hours.
He also ranked 1st in the Vulnerability Disclosure Program of the security behemoth IBM in 2020.
More recently, Halabi hit 12,000 reputation points on HackerOne, a vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform that connects penetration testers to businesses. HackerOne boasts the world’s largest community of hackers.
Halabi is currently the 48th best hacker of all time on the platform.
In addition to these achievements, Ahmad Halabi has been acknowledged with various certificates and awards by more than 150 companies around the world for reporting security vulnerabilities on their services and products.
He has managed to find a total of more than 1,000 vulnerabilities in these companies, which include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Twitter, Linkedin, Apple, and many others.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of the article incorrectly listed Ahmad Halabi as 22 years old instead of 21 – this has been corrected.