He's not your typical teenager.
Griffin Francis, a 19-year-old from Coffs Harbour on the New South Wales north coast, hasn't got a full time job but has earned thousands hacking into tech giants Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft and Adobe, then tipping them off about flaws in their security systems.
"I think of what they haven't done and about finding means to bypass that," said Mr Francis, who is studying a diploma in information technology.
"Let's say a site has a vulnerability and the administrators patched against it. I could think of flaws with the way they patch against that and try to get around it."
"[Or] security flaws that possibly compromise user data, stuff that shouldn't be there. Let's say your logged in to a website, the data is stored on their site and you tamper with the website to replicate them being logged in, stuff like that."
Mr Francis started experimenting online two years ago and now uses a super computer he built himself after his school lap top "wasn't quite cutting it."
He is one of a growing community of "white hat" hackers who are handsomely rewarded by tech giants for exposing flaws in their systems and reporting them.
Google runs a Vulnerability Reward Program that provides rewards ranging from $100 to $20,000 and a spot in their Hall of Fame to anyone reporting bugs that "substantially affects the confidentiality or integrity of user data," on sites like Youtube, Google and Blogger.
The company also put up $3 million in reward money for hackers to find vulnerabilities in Google Chrome earlier this year.