Microsoft awards another $100,000 bounty for finding a Windows 8.1 exploit

[anuseems]

In October, Microsoft awarded its top bounty reward of $100,000 for the first time to security researcher James Forshaw for his discovery of a mitigation bypass exploit in Windows 8.1. This week, the company revealed that it has given out another $100,000 prize to researcher Yu Yang for finding and reporting variants on the Mitigation Bypass.

The $100,000 reward was posted up quietly on Microsoft's Bounty Hunter honor roll page and also revealed via Twitter by Katie Moussouris, the company's Senior Security Strategist Lead.

From Redmond with love! Congrats Yu Yang (@tombkeeper) on $100,000 in new bounty awards! Quarter mil in #MSBounties http://t.co/MDxLazhPxv

Katie Moussouris (@k8em0) February 14, 2014

Yu Yang, who works for NSFOCUS Security Labs, used his own Twitter account to acknowledge his new $100,000 bounty and also seemed to hint he might have more reports to hand into Microsoft:

@k8em0 In order to express my thanks for your congratulation, maybe I should submit more. :-)

Yang Yu (@tombkeeper) February 15, 2014

Since first announcing the new software bounty program in June, Microsoft has awarded a total of $253,000 to seven security researchers for finding problems in Windows 8.1 and also in the preview version of Internet Explorer 11.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/dn469163

Edited February 16, 2014 by anuseems

[Ryrynz]

Do they really need to pay out this much money? I doubt they'd sneeze at $10,000.. why does it have to be 10x that?

[Win7nerd]

Do they really need to pay out this much money? I doubt they'd sneeze at $10,000.. why does it have to be 10x that?

question is......why NOT? lol

[PurplebeanZ]

Do they really need to pay out this much money? I doubt they'd sneeze at $10,000.. why does it have to be 10x that?

Because there are people who want to use these exploits for malicious purposes and will pay big money for them. Microsoft is trying to remove the temptation for people to sell exploits to the bad guys.

[LeeSmithG]

Do they really need to pay out this much money? I doubt they'd sneeze at $10,000.. why does it have to be 10x that?

These exploits save the company billions of dollars.

So it's small and loose change.

If cars, tv's, radios etcetera were sold with faults like Windows operating systems are, they would be removed from sale.

[Zigen]

Ok guys let's start a Nsane Win 8 exploit team, we share the $100k!

[Zigen]

Do they really need to pay out this much money? I doubt they'd sneeze at $10,000.. why does it have to be 10x that?

These exploits save the company billions of dollars.

So it's small and loose change.

If cars, tv's, radios etcetera were sold with faults like Windows operating systems are, they would be removed from sale.

Yo man your team vs Bayern tonight, excited?