InnoGames Rewards White Hat Hacker With Forge Of Empires Avatar For Helping With Game Security

By QuintLyn Bowers, News Editor January 23, 2020

Well, here's something I never imagined getting a press release about -- but here we are. Today, InnoGames -- developer of games like Tribal Wars, and Grepolis -- announced that the company will be honoring white-hat hacker Ahmed "Batee5a" Sherif with his own avatar in the city builder Forge of Empires. The company, in conjunction with security platform HackerOne, has officially named Sherif "the most important Hacker" and is rewarding him with his own in-game NPC.

Sherif is one of a number of hackers known as Bug Bounty Hunters that companies like InnoGames rely on to help assure security in their games. Effectively, companies invite hackers to help identify problems and reward them for their discoveries. Most often these rewards are monetary and in InnoGames' case, the company has already paid EUR 22,500 to 196 hackers.

In Sherif's case, InnoGames has elected to award him in-game as well after identifying him as the "most valuable" hacker within the program.

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In this article: Innogames, forge of empires.

About the Author

QuintLyn Bowers, News Editor
QuintLyn is a long-time lover of all things video game related will happily talk about them to anyone that will listen. She began writing about games for various hobby sites a little over ten years ago and has taken on various roles in the games community.

Meh 1 year ago

Batee5a means watermelon lmao.

rickshaw 1 year ago

This how game companies should operate, instead of bringing in suits.
All suits(lawyers) do is show that the game company is too full of its own boots and really doesn't care for or approve its players abilities to hack them because their code is weak, and the hacker players just shown how to break through, no fault of the hacker.
The fault lies in game company lack of coding and how full of bullshit it is when it employs suits.