Security Outfit HackerOne Taps Former HP Exec Marten Mickos as CEO

Another former Hewlett-Packard Enterprise executive has landed at a security company. HackerOne, a company that pays hackers to find and reveal software flaws so they can be fixed, says it has named Marten Mickos, a former HP cloud executive, as its CEO.

Mickos was most recently a senior VP at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and had run its Helion cloud service. He landed there in 2014 when HP acquired Eucalyptus, a cloud software company where Mickos had been CEO.

He’s also the second ex-HP exec to head up a security company. Art Gilliland, the former head of HP’s enterprise security operations, went at Skyport Systems last month.

HackerOne is an interesting outfit that has helped more than 380 customers fix more than 14,000 security vulnerabilities. It does this by coordinating a system to pay the people who find and report the vulnerabilities. These are more commonly known as “bug bounty” programs and can be pretty successful. Facebook, for instance, last year paid out $1.3 million to 321 security researchers.

HackerOne helps other companies set up their own bug bounty programs. Its customers include Twitter, Adobe, Snapchat, Dropbox and Airbnb. Since inception, HackerOne has paid out $5 million to some 2,000 security researchers.

HackerOne has raised $34 million from venture capital investors including Benchmark, New Enterprise Associates and has individual investments from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman.

It will be Mickos’s third turn in the CEO chair. Before Eucalyptus, he ran MySQL, the open source database software company, which he sold to Sun Microsystems in 2008 (it’s now part of Oracle). He also sits on the board of Nokia, the Finnish telecom company.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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