Rivals Microsoft, Google and Facebook have joined forces to
offers bounties to "friendly hackers" who can hunt down web bugs.
Dubbed Hackerone, the bug bounty programme offers cash
rewards between $300 (£186) and $5,000 (£3,110) for discovering security holes.
The size of the reward will be determined by a panel of
employees.
It may go higher if the discovery is deemed important
enough.
Anyone is eligible to enter the competition, except those
from countries with which the US has trade restrictions, such as Cuba, Iran,
North Korea and Syria.
Children are also welcome to join in although they will need
to claim their bounties from their parents.
The bounties will be paid by Microsoft and Facebook with
Google supplying a member of staff to sit on the panel.
The team has suggested areas that people may want to look
at.
It includes some of the key pieces of software that make the
web work as well as offering a category simply labelled "the
internet", which comes with a minimum bounty of $5,000.
Image flaw
Tech firms are stepping up efforts to battle hackers and
ensure the internet is safer.
Microsoft has its own independent bounty programme and it
recently raised the prize fund to $100,000.
The need for such bounty hunters was illustrated as
Microsoft announced on the same day that a brand new security hole in Windows
could allow criminals to get control of users computers via malware-injected
image files.
The flaw means that anyone opening a malware-filled TIFF
image could find malicious code installed on their computer without them
knowing.
The bug is a so-called zero-day vulnerability, which means
that it was not known about until real-life instances of attacks became
apparent.
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