Notice to bounty hunters! At the annual Salon of the Black Hat computer security, attended the Saturday, July 30 to Thursday, Aug. 4 in Las Vegas (Nevada) experts from U.S. government agencies and industries as well as the most advanced hackers of the world, Microsoft announced the launch of the Microsoft Blue Hat Contest Prize. This new award will provide 200,000 dollars (140,000 euros) to the person who will develop an anti-piracy able to withstand attacks.
With a worldwide market share estimated at 87.66%, the giant U.S. computer - and Windows - reigns supreme in the world computer. It is thus most vulnerable to pirate attacks, which have made it their main target.
The competition is open to researchers, security professionals and even young computer geeks, provided they have at least 14 years. Their proposals should be sent to Microsoft until April 2012. "This award is designed to come up with new ideas for approaches defensive computer security, Microsoft said on its website. As part of our commitment to a safer computing experience, we hope to inspire security researchers to develop innovative solutions to meet the serious security threats. "
After receipt and review of files, which will provide a prototype running on Windows and will be developed using the Windows SDK, a group of experts from Microsoft will award the prizes at the Salon Black Hat 2012. Besides the first prize in the firm Ridmond assign a second $ 50 000 and will offer a subscription service from Microsoft worth $ 10,000 that came in third place.
"The value of this award goes far beyond money, said Katie Moussouris, head of group security policy in an interview with AFP. We want to make it more difficult and costly exploitation of vulnerabilities by criminals, by inviting researchers to focus their expertise on the defensive security technologies. " Ms. Moussouris stresses that the winners retain the intellectual property of their invention, but they will have to assign the license to Microsoft without touching the royalties. The group also gives the right to use in its products, conferences and communication.
THE FAULT DETECT:
This is not the first time that new technology companies offer money in exchange for the detection of flaws in their software. Since early August, the social network Facebook, which now boasts 750 million registered users to offer $ 500 will be able to detect any flaw in its security. The sum can be increased significantly if this weakness is considered "critical".
Internet browser vendors not hesitate to introduce such measures "incentives". Mozilla now offers up to 3000 dollars for the discovery of flaws in the security of its search engine to Firefox. For his part, since 2010, Google provides a premium of at least $ 500 for detecting bugs in "Chromium" project open source Web browser of the group.
