Microsoft offers up to $100,000 to those who can expose vulnerabilities of Windows 8.1 Preview

Microsoft Corp has on Wednesday promised cash rewards for those who can breach its new operating system Windows Blue (Windows 8.1 Preview) in a novel way. It will offer up to $100,000 to those who can expose its loop holes and a further $50,000 bonus if they can explain how they did it and the fix. The US software giant is also willing to pay up to $11,000 for vulnerabilities that affect Internet Explorer 11 Preview.

The Internet Explorer 11 Preview has to be running on a Windows 8.1 Preview though. Microsoft has been known in the past to have stated that it will not offer money to security researchers who find errors in its software.

“For the first time ever, Microsoft is offering direct cash payouts in exchange for reporting certain types of vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques,” Microsoft said in a blog post.

“We are making this shift in order to learn about these issues earlier and to increase the win-win between Microsoft’s customers and the security researcher community.”

Microsoft’s senior security strategist, Katie Moussouris, noted that the company is giving out rewards because Microsoft doesn’t want to wait for another competition to learn about exploitation techniques.

“Learning about litigation bypasses on our latest platform, or ‘holes in the shield’, helps us better protect against entire classes of attacks and can help us move the state of security in our products by leaps, rather than by small increments that a traditional bug bounty alone would,” Moussouris wrote in the blog post.

Microsoft has said the payments will be through direct cash payouts. The program is expected to officially launch on June 26.

The bounty being offered by Microsoft will be the highest by a tech company for a bug bounty reward program. The web giant Google reportedly pay between $500 and $1,333.70 for flaws in its web browser Google Chrome and up to $20,000 for dangerous vulnerabilities in its web services like search engine Google, video web search Youtube, web-based email service Gmail, etc. Other companies like Yahoo, Facebook, and Paypal also run similar programs.

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