Monday, October 06, 2014
It’s that time of year and BlueHat v14 is almost upon us. As always, BlueHat is an opportunity for us to bring the brightest minds in security together, both internal and external, to discuss and tackle some of the hardest problems facing the industry today. Through this conference, our engineering teams get deep technical information and education on the latest threats from proven industry experts.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Today marks the next evolution in bounty programs at Microsoft as we launch the Microsoft Online Services Bug Bounty program starting with Office 365. In our mobile first, cloud first world, this is an exciting and logical evolution to our existing bug bounty programs. Office 365 is the first of our online services groups to launch a bounty for vulnerabilities found in their services and we will bring others into the program as we go forward.
Friday, October 04, 2013
Fall is a season traditionally associated with a harvest after planting the seeds and tending the crops. Today I’m proud to announce the names of six very smart people who have helped us make our products more secure by participating in our new bounty programs. When we launched our bounty programs in June this year, we had a few strategic goals in mind:
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
With about one week to go before we all gather at Black Hat in Las Vegas, we’re getting inquiries about precisely how the promised Live Mitigation Bypass Bounty judging at Black Hat will work. For most of the world, it works best when you get a good spot at the Microsoft booth (#301) around noon each day, so you can clearly see the excitement as some of security’s best and brightest look to pop built-in Windows 8.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
We’re three weeks into our new world of bounties for Microsoft products now, and as the clock ticks down on one program, we’re prepping for some live excitement with one of the others. First, the Internet Explorer 11 Preview Bounty is entering its final 10 days; the bounty period for that program closes on the 26th of July.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
When Microsoft decided to offer not one but three new bounties, paying outside researchers directly for security research on some of our latest products, we put a lot of thought into developing those bounty programs. We developed a customized set of programs designed to create a win-win between the security researcher community and Microsoft’s customers, by focusing on key data about what researchers were doing with vulnerabilities they found in our products.
Wednesday, July 03, 2013
Two weeks ago, Microsoft made an important evolutionary step in our work with the security community when we announced our first-ever bounty programs for security issues. One week ago, the Windows 8.1 Preview and Internet Explorer 11 Preview became available for download, and the doors officially opened for bounty-eligible submissions to secure [at] Microsoft [dot] com.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
As we announced last week, Microsoft is now offering $100,000 bounties for new exploitation techniques that can bypass our latest platform-wide defenses and up to $50,000 bonus bounties for defense ideas. We’re also offering (from now until July 26) bounties of up to $11,000 for critical security issues in Internet Explorer 11 Preview.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Our Philosophy At the heart of our community outreach programs, we’ve always had the same philosophy: help increase the win-win between Microsoft’s customers and the security research community. We have evolved and deepened our relationships with this community since the earliest days of Microsoft’s outreach. In the early 2000’s, Microsoft had to go through what I call “the five stages of vulnerability response grief.
