Microsoft To Pay $200k Prize For New Security Tech

Trailrunner7 writes "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."

Comments

It's worth a lot more than that

[blair1q]

If I develop something capable of winning this prize, I'm productizing it and making Microsoft pay for EULAs for it. That'll net me a lot more than $200k just from them, and more from everyone else.

Re:A system and method for preventing virus infect

[dragon-file]

Wire hooked up from the USB port delivers a 5 volt shock when user clicks on a malware site.

I've always preferred positive over negative reinforcement.