Google Increases Payout To Friendly Hackers

Google has been offering up rewards to security researchers and hackers to find flaws or bugs in its programming for a while. There have been several people that have collected rewards for finding these bugs by notifying Google rather than trying to exploit the issues. Google has now announced that it has increased the available rewards for reporting bugs to as much as $20,000 per bug.

People who discover the bugs will still have to report the security issues to Google and then help the security team fix the flaws. Previously, the most a researcher could get as a reward was $3133, a very odd amount. The reward of up to $20,000 per reported bug is undoubtedly hoped to lure more hackers into sharing details with Google rather than selling them on the open market.

However, Forbes reports that hackers say a well-crafted hacking technique could fetch more than $100,000 from government agencies that use the techniques to spy on users secretly. Forbes also reports that one black market seller of exploits claims that the hackers who were able to exploit Chrome in the Google Pwnium contest, winning $60,000, could have earned double that payout by selling the exploit to nefarious hackers.

[via Forbes]