Roni Carta: From Bug Bounties to Building a Safer Supply Chain

Not everyone arrives in cybersecurity the same way. Some follow formal paths—degrees, corporate training programs, or structured apprenticeships. Others take a more unpredictable route. Roni Carta did the latter.

He wasn’t a standout student, and he didn’t collect the credentials that typically open doors in tech. What he did have was an unrelenting curiosity about how systems worked and how they could be broken.

That curiosity led him into the world of ethical hacking. Bug bounty platforms became his classroom. Unlike textbooks or labs, they offered the real thing: live infrastructure, open scope, and immediate feedback. A valid report earned a payout; an invalid one meant learning why. That feedback loop of discover, report, refine, repeat became his technical education.

The Weak Spot That Kept Showing Up

At first, bug hunting was just a way for Roni to learn. Over time, Roni began to notice that many of the vulnerabilities he discovered weren’t isolated cases. They were part of a larger pattern: systemic weaknesses in how software supply chains are assembled.

 

“The fun part about bug bounty hunting is that you have a worldwide sandbox to hack companies in an ethical and legal way. It is one of the best ways to learn hacking, by actively breaking into the companies and exchanging knowledge to make them safer.”

—Roni Carta

He saw teams importing open-source components by the dozen, often with limited validation. Threat modeling was focused on external exposure, not internal dependencies. And the more he looked, the more he found. Across Fortune 500 and FAANG companies, he kept seeing the same flaw. Different stacks. Different environments. Same attack vector. Again and again.

A Community-Powered Engine

Roni credits much of his success to the community that shaped him. Ethical researchers around the world share knowledge, collaborate across time zones, and build on each other’s discoveries. While researchers compete for awards and recognition in settings such as live hacking events, the community is more about shared learning and collaboration than fierce competition.

That support system is what elevated bug bounty from a side project into a career for Roni. It became a way to contribute meaningfully to the security of systems used by millions.

When the Chain Snaps

What Roni saw years ago wasn’t just a handful of bugs. It was a pattern, the same weak point showing up across the biggest companies in tech. To him, it was a sign the software supply chain itself was fragile.

Today, that fragility is impossible to ignore:

• Compromised versions of npm packages debug and chalk shipped with obfuscated malware.
• The ghostaction campaign exfiltrated thousands of GitHub secrets by inserting a malicious workflow file into hundreds of repositories.
• A compromise in a trusted third-party component  for a crypto exchange enabled cybercriminals to reroute a $1.5 billion crypto transaction into a state-sponsored wallet.

These aren’t flukes. They echo exactly what Roni was finding in production environments years earlier: the weakest link isn’t always at the perimeter. Sometimes it’s the third-party code you pull in or component you use without question.

Why Roni’s Story Matters

Roni didn’t foresee those exact attacks but he recognized the pattern long before they made headlines. Bug bounty programs gave him the freedom to explore, to notice what others overlooked, and the confidence to start his own company to offer solutions to the problem.

Because in the end, security research isn’t about where you start. It’s about how you think: questioning, experimenting, seeing what others miss, and ultimately building a safer internet.

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