Microsoft pays out first US$100,000 bug bounty
L33tdawg: James will be speaking at #HITB2013KUL next week where he's presenting The Forger’s Art: Exploiting XML Digital Signature Implementations
Microsoft is paying a well-known hacking expert more than US$100,000 (A$106,000) for finding security holes in its software, one of the largest such bounties awarded to date by a high-tech company.
The software maker also released a much anticipated update to Internet Explorer, which it said fixes a bug that made users of the world's most popular browser vulnerable to remote attack.
James Forshaw, who heads vulnerability research at London-based security consulting firm Context Information Security, won Microsoft's first US$100,000 bounty for identifying a new "exploitation technique" in Windows, which will allow it to develop defenses against an entire class of attacks. Forshaw earned another US$9400 for identifying security bugs in a preview release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 11 browser, Katie Moussouris, senior security strategist with Microsoft Security Response Center, said in a blog.
