Shameer Amir, a Multan Native, 21 years old Pakistani who is blessed with extraordinary hacking skills has done so much that has brought his name at 3rd position in the list world's top bug hunters by Dark Reading, a Cyber Security news site. He has also grabbed 11th position in the list of most rated hackers in the world by HackerOne, a vulnerability disclosure company in California. He has worked for more than 300 international organizations. World's tech giants like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn and Dropbox are in the list of organizations that are benefited by his services. But it is not just about titles, he has earned a huge amount as many as $150, 000 all just in span of two years by bug reporting, detecting flaws in system or checking errors in programs.
Shameer is currently running his own startup company in Lahore named as Cyphlon. He has his own team of six members in this setup and is working with Plan9 of Punjab Information Technology Board. He has been specially invited to DefCON, Las Vegas, Nevada to attend one of the world's largest hackers’ convention that is organized by HackerOne. Unfortunately he hasn’t been much into spotlight by Pakistani media but ProPakistani. Pk has recently interviewed this brilliant individual in which he has talked about his Pentium 3 computer that has many issues and from this step his interest developed in this domain to tackle problems and bugs related to computer hardware and software. He used to solve these problems by searching from Google and practicing these tools on his own.
Shameer Amir is a graduate of electrical engineer from Hamdard University and there too, he has been a scholarship holder student. During his university career, he attended a seminar on Cyber Security that aroused his interest in this field more seriously and he actually started his research and study that eventually landed him into world the of White Hat Hacking. This had been the turning point in his life. Amir has stated White Hat Hacking as Ethical Hacking. As he describes his role as
My primary role has been to discover exploits in products and services that we use in our everyday life. After I identify a security risk, I contact the people behind the product and they resolve the complaints. As an information vulnerability researcher, they acknowledge my efforts and even pay bounties after successfully resolving the exploits.
Shameer has pointed out issues in education system by suggesting ways and techniques that should be adopted for coming generations so that they would be properly skilled rather than being fooled by institutes. He opted that there should be more Cyber Security training institutes in Pakistan. For upcoming hackers and developers he advised by saying that they can earn money by not even having basic knowledge of development and designing of a system but this will get them nowhere.
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Shameer Amir's story is definitely a source of inspiration and motivation for current youth of Pakistan and is also opening up ways to take ethical hacking as profession.
