Google Ups Bug Bounty To $20,000

Trailrunner7 writes, quoting Threatpost: "Search giant Google said it is quintupling the top bounty it will pay for information on security holes in its products to $20,000. Google said it was updating its rewards and rules for the bounty program, which is celebrating its first anniversary. In addition to a top prize of $20,000 for vulnerabilities that allow code to be executed on product systems, Google said it would pay $10,000 for SQL injection and equivalent vulnerabilities in its services and for certain vulnerabilities that leak information or allow attackers to bypass authentication or authorization features."

Comments

Re:A failure of conventional hack-ism ?

[mark-t]

It probably means that they realize that they've come to a point in the project where crowdsourcing QA is more cost-effective than using internal QA. This isn't because their internal QA is incompetent, it's because they are only just so many.

Re:A failure of conventional hack-ism ?

[Anonymous Coward]

the inference to be drawn is that finding a security hole would take more than 20k of programmer time, so probably the holes remaining are _hard_ to find. Seems more like a success than a failure to me.

Re:A failure of conventional hack-ism ?

[Bucky24]

I can see why you might think that, but I strongly suspect that Google has already put their own programmers to work finding bugs. This is their attempt to "crowdsource" the bug-finding. The more eyes on the code, the more bugs that can be found. Also they realize that not all the brilliant minds work for them, and some might decide to exploit a bug for monetary gain rather then turn it in. The bounty is to give those people a bit more of a reason to turn the bug in.