After opening the box we can read in the note:
Hello comrade, welcome to your search!
In this novelistic way begins the job interview to join Red Balloon, a small company founded in 2011 by Ang Cui based in New York.
The cybersecurity is growing at a tremendous pace, so much so that the talent demand is rapidly outsupplying. This is why the “acquisition” of a good profile for the company has become a very tedious and ingenuous task.
The proof
In this case, the company Red Balloon has designed a test aimed at identifying hackers with the “skills and passion” that the position requires, where the prize is 0.1337 Bitcoins.
Applicants for the offer receive a mysterious box at home by mail, in which they find a blank disk, an adapter and the typewritten note that we mentioned at the beginning with GPS coordinates. If they manage to solve this puzzle and claim the Bitcoins hidden inside, they are asked to buy a ticket to New York City to meet at the point indicated in the note and continue with their interview.
“We are a small company, we are looking for a kind of person very specialized security, and we don’t have the huge amount of human energy to waste reviewing every resume,” Cui said.
They also indicated that the test is designed to select people with knowledge computer hacking capable of solving problems that probably would never have been encountered before.
Red Balloon indicates that it has sent the test to almost all applicants but so far, only the 1% has managed to solve it. They also indicate that they regularly change parts of the test to ensure that the work to solve it cannot be shared.
“If I ship 150 to 200 pounds of hard drives, I'll typically get a team member back,” Cui said. “It's a worthy investment.”
As a curiosity, we'll tell you that the amount of bitcoins contained on the hard drives has not been chosen at random. "1337" in hacker language means "leet," a term used by hackers to refer to the "elite."
