Microsoft is inviting people to hack its systems and report the flaws to them in exchange of $100,000. The tech giant hopes that by doubling the reward price, hackers would want to participate in its bug bounty program and prevent them from disclosing the security flaws to the public.
"We are raising the Bounty for Defense maximum from $50,000 USD to $100,000 USD. I am also very excited to announce that we are launching a bonus period for Authentication vulnerabilities in the Online Services Bug Bounty. We will be running an onsite contest at Black Hat in Las Vegas, August 5-6, related to this effort. Lastly, we are adding RemoteApp to the list of domains covered in the Online Services Bug Bounty," Jason Shirk, security architect at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Microsoft has recently launched its Windows 10 operating system, which would definitely be a target. Other favorite targets for cybercriminals include Java and Flash because of their wide user base, according to ZDNet.
"Learning about new exploitation techniques earlier helps Microsoft improve security by leaps, instead of capturing one vulnerability at a time as a traditional bug bounty alone would," Shirk added.
Crowdsourced security Bugcrowd released the State of Bug Bounty Report, showing that they have paid a total of $724,014 to 566 researchers between January 2013 and June 2015. Out of 37,227 submissions, only 7,958 were valid. Most of the bug hunters were based in India, the U.S., and the U.K.
