Microsoft on Tuesday announced the launch of a new bug bounty program that offers researchers the opportunity to earn up to $100,000 for discovering serious vulnerabilities in the company’s various identity services.
White hat hackers can earn a monetary reward ranging between $500 and $100,000 if they find flaws that impact Microsoft Identity services, flaws that can be leveraged to hijack Microsoft and Azure Active Directory accounts, vulnerabilities affecting the OpenID or OAuth 2.0 standards, or weaknesses that affect the Microsoft Authenticator applications for iOS and Android.
The list of domains covered by the new bug bounty program includes login.windows.net, login.microsoftonline.com, login.live.com, account.live.com, account.windowsazure.com, account.activedirectory.windowsazure.com, credential.activedirectory.windowsazure.com, portal.office.com and passwordreset.microsoftonline.com.
The top reward can be earned for a high quality submission describing ways to bypass multi-factor authentication, or design vulnerabilities in the authentication standards used by Microsoft. OpenID and OAuth implementation flaws can earn hackers up to $75,000.
The smallest rewards are offered for XSS (up to $10,000), authorization issues ($8,000), and sensitive data exposure ($5,000).
“A high-quality report provides the information necessary for an engineer to quickly reproduce, understand, and fix the issue. This typically includes a concise write up containing any required background information, a description of the bug, and a proof of concept. We recognize that some issues are extremely difficult to reproduce and understand, and this will be considered when adjudicating the quality of a submission,” Microsoft wrote on a page dedicated to its new bug bounty program.
The tech giant currently runs several bug bounty programs that offer hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single vulnerability report. This includes the speculative execution side-channel program, which offers up to $250,000 and which the company launched following the disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre; the Hyper-V program, which also offers up to $250,000; the mitigation bypass bounty, with rewards of up to $100,000 for novel exploitation techniques against Windows protections; and the Bounty for Defense, which offers an additional $100,000 for defenses to the mitigation bypass techniques.
Related: HackerOne Bug Bounty Programs Paid Out $11 Million in 2017

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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