Companies are always look for vulnerabilities in their products and at times, they may call upon the public in their quest. Facebook had recently done something like this offering up a reward for anyone that could find a security flaw within their social website and this time, it is Google that is doing the same.
According to Forbes, Google is offering up a substantial prize of $1 million to anyone that manages to find a vulnerability in their Chrome browser. After investigation, this vulnerability must turn out to be a security risk to members of the public that have Chrome installed on their workstation. There is an annual event that takes place which is called Pwn2Own. Among other things, one of the items that takes place is hackers will try and find security flaws in various products. For the past three years, Google has offered up its Chrome browser to see if any flaws could be identified and so far, over these three years, none have been identified. This of course is a pretty good track record for Google when you consider that all of the other browser entries have not fared so well. In fact, it’s not just Internet Explorer that was susceptible to hacker attacks, but so was Apple’s Safari browser and Mozilla’s Firefox.
Part of the terms regarding this year’s prize money being offered by Google is anyone that finds an exploit in the browser must be willing to also provide information on how the exploit was discovered and manipulated. According to Google, it’s one thing to fix the flaw but it’s another thing to know how it was done. This additional information will allow Google to learn more about how these exploits are engineered.
