Microsoft Bug Bounties Flow To Googlers

chicksdaddy writes "Lucre from Microsoft's newly minted bug bounty program is lining the pockets of Google researchers. Two Google employees earned the distinction of receiving some of the first (official) monetary rewards under the company's bounty program. Fermín Serna, a researcher in Google's Mountain View, California headquarters, said 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. Serna declined to discuss the details of his discovery until Microsoft had a patch ready to release. But he said that any weakness in ASLR warranted attention. 'Mainly all security mitigations in place depend on ASLR. So bringing that one down, weakens the system a lot and makes it easy the exploitation of other vulnerabilities,' he said. As for his bounty, Serna (whose resume includes work for Microsoft on the MSRC Engineering team) said it was 'way less' than the maximum $11,000 bounty for a full, working exploit that bypasses all the Windows 8 mitigations (which includes ASLR as well as the Data Execution Prevention or DEP technology). 'But still nice!'"