Google Gives More Rewards to Researchers that Reports Major Bugs

Google has just announced that they have increased their rewards for researchers who report major bugs found in their system. Under the company’s Vulnerability Rewards Program or VRP, Google will be offering monetary compensation to individuals, research firms, and developers who submit important information about bugs they may not be aware of.

According to CNET, Google has increased their reward to $31,337 from $20,000 for reported bugs regarding the remote code execution on the servers of Google. Moreover, the reward for unrestricted database access has been increased to $13,337 from $10,000. The increased amount is said to be paying homage to “1337”, which is known as leet or an alternative internet alphabet.

Over the years, it has become harder and harder to find critical vulnerabilities from Google’s system. For that reason, the company seeks the aid of researchers to keep their properties free from problems. And as Google’s way of showing their appreciation for the amount of time the researchers have devoted for finding the said vulnerabilities, better changes have been made to their VRP.

The announcement has been posted on Google’s official blog and with it are stats of which country has contributed the most of the VRP rewards in the last few years. This includes India, China, France and Germany, all showing a significant increase of reports since 2015. Based on the stats, the company saw a 40% increase in reports in 2016 compared to its previous year which resulted in 30% of the rewards being claimed.

Google is not the only firm that offers bug bounty program to developers, individuals and research companies for reporting critical bugs found in a website’s system. Other firms known to have a similar program are Facebook, Reddit, Yahoo!, Square and of course Microsoft. With this kind of program, a firm is able to discover and prevent a possible bug to be used to exploit their users.