Microsoft’s first ‘Bug Bounty’ goes to….. a Google Engineer

Google has been paying out bounty’s to hackers for quite some time who help find and identify security holes and various other things. Microsoft, for the first time EVER, finally decided to do the same thing. They offered up a bounty for anyone who could discover a vulnerability in Windows 8.1. Surprise, surprise, a critical vulnerability was discovered in a preview version of Explorer 11. Guess who found it? A Google engineer.

The security community has responded enthusiastically to our new bounty programs, submitting over a dozen issues for us to investigate in just the first two weeks since the programs opened.  I personally notified the very first bounty recipient via email today that his submission for the Internet Explorer 11 Preview Bug Bounty is confirmed and validated. (Translation: He’s getting paid.)

According to PC world, the engineers name is Ivan Fratric. Ivan stands to a maximum of $11,000 for the discovery.

another win for Google I would say. Google does have a strong interest in Microsoft stepping up their security in their software thanks to a number of Microsoft vulnerabilities that Chinese hackers used a while back to break into Google. It is pretty hard to protect yourself when users out there can use other browsers and access points to to hack their way in.

Source: PCWorld via 9to5Google