Hornet Appoints Marten Mickos, HackerOne CEO, to Board of Advisors

The queer social network extends its longstanding collaboration with HackerOne, further strengthening a dedication to security and user safety

West Hollywood, Calif., Aug 19, 2021 — Hornet Networks, the world’s queer social network, today announced the appointment of Marten Mickos, CEO of HackerOne (hackerone.com), to its Board of Advisors. This adds even more expertise to the leading platform, which is dedicated to keeping queer people safe, allowing them to open up and authentically connect to their community anytime, anywhere around the world.

Mickos brings to the table a strong record on community-based security at HackerOne and open source communities from his prior role as CEO of MySQL. Hornet has been working with HackerOne since 2017 and was one of the first social apps to embrace hacker-powered security. Since then, Hornet has fixed 61 vulnerabilities (23% of which were rated critical/high), strengthening the security of the site and providing more safety to users. Most notably, in the last four quarters Hornet has consistently fixed its vulnerabilities quicker than other social programs on the HackerOne platform. Hornet has also developed strong relationships with its anchor hackers, who regularly engage in the program and have each submitted more than 10 resolved reports.

“I am delighted to help the team at Hornet to build a safe space for the queer community,” says Mickos. “By committing to putting the safety of their users above everything else, they have created the environment for a flourishing and authentic community. Queer people face particular threats, not only from the usual spammers and cybercriminals, but also from those law enforcement agencies that continue to criminalize the LGBTQ community. I take particular pride in our leading role to keep queer people safe.”

Mickos joins Ravi Mehta, former Chief Product Officer at Tinder and now at Reforge; Niklas Lindstrom, former Chief Technology Officer at Skout and Meet, now at UnitQ; and Michael Edelstein, former President at NBC Universal International, now at Edelstein Company.

“We are delighted to recruit yet another key thought leader into our advisory group, helping us to accelerate our growth as the world’s leading queer social network,” says Christof Wittig, CEO and co-founder of Hornet. “Marten has been influential in our thinking since his days at MySQL, the leading open source community database, and we are excited to have him take on a more prominent role in steering our destiny at Hornet.”

About Hornet

Hornet is the world’s queer social network with over 35 million diverse users, providing a community home base that is available anytime, anywhere. Amplifying the radical, affirmative power of the queer community with cutting-edge technology, users feel comfortable sharing their experiences with friends who understand and validate their life. To find out more, please visit: hornet.com

About HackerOne

HackerOne empowers the world to build a safer internet. As the world’s most trusted hacker-powered security platform, HackerOne gives organizations access to the largest community of hackers on the planet. Armed with the most robust database of vulnerability trends and industry benchmarks, the hacker community mitigates cyber risk by searching, finding and safely reporting real-world security weaknesses for organizations across all industries and attack surfaces. Customers include The U.S. Department of Defense, Dropbox, General Motors, GitHub, Goldman Sachs, Google, Hyatt, Intel, Lufthansa, Microsoft, MINDEF Singapore, Nintendo, PayPal, Slack, Starbucks, Twitter and Verizon Media. HackerOne was ranked fifth on the Fast Company World’s Most Innovative Companies list for 2020. To find out more, please visit: hackerone.com

Press contact: press@hornet.com

Marten Mickos hi-res headshot by Albert Law available here