Public-facing websites and services used by the Marine Corps were targeted by hackers over the weekend – but that was part of the plan. To help identify vulnerabilities In the Marine Corps Enterprise Network, the Department of Defense and HackerOne, a service that runs crowd-sourced security testing, launched Hack the Marine Corps, a “bug bounty program” that pays hackers to identify and report vulnerabilities. As the United States faces increasing cybersecurity threats, programs such as Hack the Marine Corps are a great way to identify and fix potential problems before they really do become damaging security breaches.

Hack the Marine Corps has already been successful. The program kicked off with a live event in Las Vegas with nearly 100 ethical hackers who, during the nine-hour event, identified 75 unique security vulnerabilities. True to the idea of “bug bounty,” the Marine Corps shelled out more than $80,000 to those who had identified problems.