Lessons Learned in Building a Vulnerability Coordination Program

CANCUN – Bounty programs are mislabeled creatures, too often pigeonholed as a payoff for finding individual vulnerabilities in software. Wrong. “The name bug bounty is actually a false categorization of what is truly just an incentive program,” said Katie Moussouris, chief policy officer at...

New Facebook Internet Defense Prize Pays Out $50,000 Award

Large technology companies may already have bug bounty programs in place that reward researchers who attack and find holes in software or web platforms. Slowly, some are also starting to institute programs that pay for defensive measures. Facebook is the latest to do so with the implementation of...

Microsoft Mitigation Bypass Bug Bounty Winner Yang Yu

Yang Yu is no stranger to writing mitigation bypasses for Microsoft Windows products. A year ago at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, the 35-year-old security researcher from Beijing did an extensive presentation on bypassing Address Space Layout Randomization ASLR and Data Execution...

Microsoft Mitigation Bypass Bug Bounty Winner Yang Yu

Microsoft has paid out another $100,000 bounty as part of its Security Response Center’s bounty program. A researcher from Asia named Yang Yu was awarded the prize today for three mitigation bypass variants, Microsoft announced. “This payout reflects the fact that we learned something new that wi...

Bounty Evolution: $100,000 for New Mitigation Bypass Techniques Wanted Dead or Alive

Those who know me personally or follow me on Twitter are familiar with my obsession with karaoke. I do it as often as I can rope people into going with me, never forcing anyone to sing, though invariably everyone does – or at least sings from the sidelines to the songs they know...

Congratulations to James Forshaw Recipient of Our First $100,000 Bounty for New Mitigation Bypass Techniques!

Congratulations to James Forshaw for coming up with a new exploitation technique to get our first ever $100,000 bounty. A security vulnerability researcher with Context Information Security, James already came in hot with design level bugs he found during the IE11 Preview Bug Bounty, and we’re...

Microsoft paid over $28,000 Rewards to Six Researchers for its first ever Bug Bounty Program

Microsoft today announced that they had paid more than $28,000 in rewards to Security Researchers for its first Bug Bounty program, that went on for a month during the preview release of Internet Explorer 11 IE11. The program was designed to run during Internet Explorer 11's browser beta test on...

Preparing for Live Pwnage: Mitigation Bypass Bounty Machine Specs for Black Hat

With about one week to go before we all gather at Black Hat in Las Vegas, we’re getting inquiries about precisely how the promised Live Mitigation Bypass Bounty judging at Black Hat will work. For most of the world, it works best when you get a good spot at the Microsoft booth 301 around noon eac...

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...