Red Balloon Cyber Security Company is using a unique way to get their next recruits. The company asks prospective candidates to crack an encrypted hard drive before they are offered the opportunity to work with the security firm.

According to the company’s description, anyone with “the skills and passion” to crack the hard drive will be offered 0.1337 Bitcoin (BTC) or about $4,900 as of press time.

Any applicant who decrypts the hard drive and claims the BTC funds is asked to buy a ticket to travel to New York for the recruitment process.

“You have to do a somewhat unusual technical interview: unlocking a hard drive with Bitcoin,” the cybersecurity firm stated.

The Chief executive officer of Red Balloon, Ang Cui, commented on the strange recruitment process by saying that his company is one of the very few firms that use it to recruit its workforce.

According to him, the firm is taking such a method because it is a small company and doesn’t have enough human resources to spend on sorting and going through each resume. So, the idea is to use a smart and effective method to recruit a specialized tech expert group.

Cui added that the security firm has sent out the test invitation to anyone interested in the advertised position. He also said only very few persons could scale through the interview, pointing out that the success rate was just 1%.

Red Balloon added 6 people to its workforce, making it 29 employees presently working in the firm. The cybersecurity firm was founded in 2011 and had been using this strange interview method to recruit some of its workers for some time.

A crypto enthusiast recently claimed that he received such invitation and instructions to get back Bitcoin five years ago on Twitter.

Some others also said Red Balloon had been known to use such a recruitment method. Some of them said as part of the Decon Hacker Conference in 2017; the security firm asked programmers to decrypt hard drives with Bitcoin.

Last month, Red Balloon security appointed David Doggett as a senior strategist for its industrial market. As a team senior, his recruitment method was probably not through the hard drive cracking task.

The security firm claims it’s a leading developer of firmware-based security systems that protect embedded devices, including automation systems and electrical systems, from different potential cyber-attacks.

The company’s flagship product, Symbiote Defense, is a defense system designed for embedded devices.

Red Balloon has lots of other products that help customers keep their security systems safe from unwanted exploitation. This explains why the firm uses the unique method of hard drive encryption to recruit its new workforce.

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