New Bounty Programs – One Week In

Two weeks ago, Microsoft made an important evolutionary step in our work with the security community when we announced our first-ever bounty programs for security issues. One week ago, the Windows 8.1 Preview and Internet Explorer 11 Preview became available for download, and the doors officially...

Heart of Blue Gold – Announcing New Bounty Programs

Our Philosophy At the heart of our community outreach programs, we’ve always had the same philosophy: help increase the win-win between Microsoft’s customers and the security research community. We have evolved and deepened our relationships with this community since the earliest days of...

New Bounty Program Details

Today we announced the upcoming Mitigation Bypass Bounty, the BlueHat Bonus for Defense, and the Internet Explorer 11 Preview Bug Bounty program. It’s very exciting to finally take the wraps off of these initiatives and we are anticipating some great submissions from the security research...

Announcing the Microsoft Bounty Programs

Over the years, weve put a lot of work into helping secure the computing ecosystem and limiting the number of issues in our products. The security researcher community is critical to these efforts, as they help us find vulnerabilities in our software that we may have missed. Now were taking it ev...

New HP Report Shows 19 Percent Drop in Reported Vulnerabilities

A new study due for public release Thursday shows vulnerabilities reported in commercial software applications fell significantly last year, but almost a quarter of those found were considered at high risk for exploitation. The “2011 Top Cyber Security Risks Report,” based on data from HP’s DV...

Pentagon Requests Half Billion in Funding to DARPA

In the Pentagon’s 2012 defense budget request, DARPA stands to receive roughly a half billion dollars in funding to “invest in cybertechnologies.” However, what that means is unclear. The announcement represents growing concerns by the federal government that the United States is sorely...

Facebook Revises Bug Disclosure Policy

Social networking behemoth Facebook revised their bug disclosure policy last week to protect well-intentioned vulnerability researchers from potential lawsuits stemming from their discoveries. The revisions, which were made with the assistance of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are part of...