Google bug bounty hunters made $410,000 last year

Bug hunters have made a total of $410,000 (£258,900) in the last year after sending in their findings to Google.

Over 1,100 flaws have been found in Google-owned software since the tech giant launched its vulnerability report programme in November 2010.

Of those, 730 merited a monetary reward. Google sought to distance itself from insecure design claims, saying around half of the bugs that received a reward were in software written by around 50 companies it had acquired. “The rest were distributed across applications developed by Google (several hundred new ones each year). Significantly, the vast majority of our initial bug reporters had never filed bugs with us before we started offering monetary rewards,” said Adam Mein, technical program manager for the Google Security Team, in a blog post.