iDefense Revamps Bucks for Bugs Contest

iDefense has revamped its vulnerability contest in an effort to raise the bar for researchers who compete in the cash for zero-day exploits program: it will no longer offer its separate quarterly vulnerability submission challenge, but will instead annually reward the best of the bugs it accepts through its Vulnerability Contributor Program.

“We want to bring 'sexy' back to vulnerability research,” says Rick Howard, intelligence director for iDefense Labs. “Two to three years ago, these kinds of programs were very sexy to the security community, paying hackers to find exploits in common apps… but the focus of what is sexy has changed from finding vulnerabilities to what the malicious code is doing. That’s where the action is.”

So instead of accepting entries for your basic denial-of-service bug like it used to do, iDefense is now looking for exploits that demonstrate real, specific things the bug can do to an application, such as how exploit code could control or alter the Outlook client when it launches, for example, Howard says.