For the fourth consecutive year, Microsoft has announced paying out more than $13 million through its bug bounty programs.
The tech giant revealed this week that it awarded a total of $13.8 million to 345 researchers from more than 45 countries between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023. The money was paid out for more than 1,100 vulnerability reports, with the highest single reward reaching $200,000.
Microsoft announced paying out similar amounts in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
The company is running 17 bug bounty programs, a majority for its cloud services and platforms. Researchers are also being offered significant rewards as part of grants and challenges.
The highest reward — up to $250,000 — has been offered for critical vulnerabilities found in the Hyper-V hypervisor.
Since the beginning of the year, Microsoft announced new high-impact scenarios for the Microsoft 365 Insider Builds on Windows program, Teams Preview and Bing bug bounty research invitation challenges, and the addition of secure boot research scenarios to the Windows Insider Preview program.
Other tech giants have also paid out millions through their bug bounty programs. The latest available data shows that Facebook parent Meta paid $16 million since 2011, Google paid $12 million in 2022, Intel paid $4.1 million since 2017, and Apple paid $20 million since 2016.
Related: Hacker Conversations: Youssef Sammouda, Bug Bounty Hunter
Related: Google Launches Bug Bounty Program for Mobile Applications
Related: SquareX Launches Bug Bounty Program for Browser Security Product
Related: Adobe Inviting Researchers to Private Bug Bounty Program
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing 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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