Two Google employees earned the distinction of receiving some of the first monetary rewards (a.k.a. “bounties”) issued under the company’s newly minted bounty program. Fermín Serna, a researcher in Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters, told The Security Ledger that he received a bounty issued by Microsoft this week for information on an Internet Explorer information leak that could allow a malicious hacker to bypass Microsoft’s Address Space Layout Randomization (or ASLR) technology. His bounty followed the first ever (officially) paid to a researcher by Microsoft: a bounty that went to Serna’s colleague, Ivan Fratic, a Google engineer based in Zurich, Switzerland, for information about a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 11 Preview. Fratic (@ifsecure) acknowledged the honor in a July 11 post on his Twitter account. In an e-mail exchange with The Security Ledger, Serna declined to discuss the details of his discovery until Microsoft had a patch ready to release. But […]
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Microsoft Set To Pay First Bug Bounty For IE Hole
Weeks after launching its first, formal bug bounty program, Microsoft is set to issue its first monetary reward, according to a blog post by Katie Moussouris, the Senior Security Strategist at Microsoft’s Security Response Center (MSRC). Writing on Wednesday, Moussouris said that the company has received “over a dozen” submissions since it launched the paid bounty program on June 26, and that “I personally notified the very first bounty recipient via email today that his submission for the Internet Explorer 11 Preview Bug Bounty is confirmed and validated. (Translation: He’s getting paid.)” Last month, Microsoft announced its new policy to pay for information about serious vulnerabilities in its products. The company had long maintained that it provided other kinds of rewards for information on software holes – mostly recognition and jobs – and didn’t need to offer bounties, as firms like Google, The Mozilla Foundation and Facebook do. In launching the new […]
Late To The Party, Microsoft Offers Mega Bounties For Software Bugs
Microsoft on Wednesday announced its first ever formal program to pay security researchers for finding software vulnerabilities in its newest products. The bug bounty program will launch on June 26 and be formally unveiled at the upcoming Black Hat Briefings hacker conference in Las Vegas at the end of July. And, though late to the party, Microsoft is making up for lost time by going large. The Redmond, Washington software maker will pay researchers up to $100,000 for “truly novel” exploitation techniques that defeat protections built into the very latest version of Windows, 8.1 Preview. It will additionally pay $50,000 for ideas for defensive strategies that accompany a bypass, raising the total potential purse for an exploit and accompanying remediation to $150,000. Additionally, Microsoft announced a short-term bounty program for its Internet Explorer 11 Preview, with the company paying up to $11,000 USD for critical vulnerabilities that affect Internet Explorer […]
Fraud Analytics: You’re Doing It Wrong!
One of the most vexing problems in computer security today is distinguishing malicious from legitimate behavior on victim networks. Sophisticated cyber criminals and nation-backed hacking groups make a point of moving low and slow on compromised end points and networks, while victim organizations are (rightly) wary of disrupting legitimate business activity for the sake of spotting a breach. In this Security Ledger Podcast, Paul interviews Jason Sloderbeck, Director of Product Management at RSA, EMC’s security division. Jason talks about RSA’s Silvertail fraud analytics technology, and the organizational and technology issues that keep victims from spotting attacks. One of the big mistakes organizations make when they investigate attacks, Sloderbeck said, is focusing too narrowly on a point in time during a web session that is felt to be a good indicator of compromise – like when a user authenticates to a service or “checks out” on an e-commerce web site. “There’s a whole […]
Missing in Action At BlackHat: The PC
Once the target of choice for hackers of all stripes, personal computers (PC) will be -at most- a side attraction at this year’s annual Black Hat Briefings show in Las Vegas, where presentations on ways to attack mobile devices and other networked “stuff” will take center stage. Just over ten percent of the scheduled talks and turbo talks at The Black Hat Briefings in early August (5 of 47) will be devoted to attacks against what might be considered “traditional” endpoints, like end user systems and servers running Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s Mac OSX and Linux. By contrast, more than 30% will discuss security flaws and attacks against mobile phones or other “smart” devices including wireless surveillance cameras, home automation systems and smart meters. The dearth of PC-focused talks isn’t a new trend in and of itself. As far back as 2006, talks that explicitly discussed security issues with components of Microsoft’s […]
