Microsoft To Pay $200k Prize For New Security Tech

Thursday, August 04, 2011 in Tech News

In the face of mounting external pressure to begin paying bug bounties,"In the face of mounting external pressure to begin paying bug bounties, Microsoft is instead launching a new program that will pay a $200,000 top prize to a security researcher who develops the most innovative defensive security technology. The program is designed to 'inspire researchers to focus their talents on defensive technologies,' the company said. Known as the Blue Hat Prize, after the company's regular internal research conferences, the program will focus in its first year on getting researchers to design a novel runtime technology to defend against memory safety vulnerabilities. Microsoft security officials said that rather than paying for individual bugs the way that some other companies such as Google, Mozilla and others do, they wanted to encourage researchers to think about ways to defeat entire classes of bugs.