Management & Strategy

Hackers Can Earn $20,000 for Xbox Vulnerabilities

Microsoft on Thursday announced the launch of an Xbox bug bounty program with rewards of up to $20,000 for critical remote code execution vulnerabilities.

Eduard Kovacs

January 30, 2020

Microsoft on Thursday announced the launch of an Xbox bug bounty program with rewards of up to $20,000 for critical remote code execution vulnerabilities.

According to Microsoft, the new bug bounty program covers the Xbox Live network and services. The company is hoping to receive reports describing XSS, CSRF, IDOR, insecure deserialization, injection, server-side code execution, security misconfigurations, and the use of components with known vulnerabilities. Xbox bug bounty program

The vulnerabilities can lead to remote code execution, privilege escalation, security bypass, information disclosure, spoofing, or tampering. Denial-of-service (DoS) flaws are out of scope.

Remote code execution flaws can earn hackers between $5,000 and $20,000, and privilege escalation vulnerabilities are worth between $1,000 and $8,000.

The bounty amount will be determined based on the quality of the vulnerability report. In the case of remote code execution flaws, for instance, a low-quality report will only receive $10,000, even if the weakness is critical.

“Since launching in 2002, the Xbox network has enabled millions of users to share their common love of gaming on a safe and secure service. The bounty program supplements our existing investments in security development and testing to uncover and remediate vulnerabilities which have a direct and demonstrable impact on the security of Xbox customers,” Microsoft said in a blog post.

Written By Eduard Kovacs

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

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