Earn $250,000 for telling Microsoft precisely what’s b0rked in Windows now

As even Microsoft’s staff are human – I do know, astonishing – Windows 10 and different creations of theirs had been all the time going to have tiny flaws constructed into them. Designing and implementing working methods and applications isn’t precisely what you’d name a simple enterprise, in any case. Of course, folks within the know can discover these flaws and exploit them for revenue, promoting them to the very best bidder. Others might select to let the general public know, opening working methods like Windows as much as assault from ne’er do wells.

One of the simplest (authorized) methods to cease folks doing that is by providing them a monetary incentive. Microsoft’s first bug bounty program was introduced in 2013, aiming to do precisely that – encourage these with dodgy intentions to disclose the failings (in that case, in Internet Explorer) to them relatively than promote the data to the very best bidder, and to incentivise researchers who might not in any other case have bothered to try to discover bugs too.

In 2013, Microsoft paid out over $28,000, however the bounties have shortly snowballed into a lot larger figures, with practically 1 / 4 of one million dollars paid out in 2014. This yr’s active bounty programs, a few of which have carried over from 2013, embrace a reward of up-to $30,000 for locating vulnerabilities in Windows Defender, as much as $100,000 for ‘Novel exploitation techniques against protections built into the latest version of the Windows operating system’, and the opportunity of an enormous $250,000 sum for locating points with Microsoft Hyper-V, which is liable for creating digital machines.

For the sensible cookies with the bug-hunting data to get entangled on this pursuit, it’s quickly turning into profitable work. Who is aware of how a lot Microsoft will likely be shelling out in one other 4 years?

Thanks, Bit-Tech.