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