14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft recently announced the first bug bounty program for Windows 8.1 Preview and Internet Explorer 11, promising to pay engineers up to $11,000 (€8,450) for every security flaw they find in the new browser.
According to a post published by Katie Moussouris, senior security strategist at Microsoft, the company has already paid one security engineer for finding a glitch in Internet Explorer 11, but no specifics have been provided.
“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.)” Moussouris wrote.
And still, Moussouris mentioned the name of the lucky winner in a short tweet the past week, revealing that he’s none other than Ivan Fratric, a Google information security engineer who also won $50,000 (€38,300) in 2012 in the software maker’s BlueHat contest.
Moussouris claims that the feedback to Microsoft’s new bug bounty program is fantastic, so many more engineers will actually be notified about their prizes in the coming weeks.
“We have other researchers who have qualified for bounties under the IE11 program as well, and their notifications will be coming from secure [at] Microsoft [dot] com this week and beyond. We plan to add an acknowledgement page on our bounty web site, listing the researchers who would like to be publicly recognized for their contributions to helping us make our products more secure,” she wrote.
The bug bounty program for Internet Explorer 11 Preview will officially end on July 26, so the company urges everyone who’d like to take part to the contest to submit the detected issues as soon as possible.