What do a 19-year-old researcher from Uruguay, a restaurant owner from Cluj, Romania and a Cambridge professor have in common? They’re all security researchers—a global community of professionals, academics, students and hobbyists who are essential to the safety of our products and the web as a whole. We’re grateful to be a part of this community and support their work in a bunch of ways, including the Vulnerability Rewards Program and our 2018 Privacy and Security academic research awards.
Whether it’s been written by a PhD or a hobbyist, software inevitably has bugs that make it behave in unexpected ways. The important thing is that bugs are identified and patched as quickly as possible. Back in 2010, we started the Vulnerability Reward Program to get help from the security research community in identifying and reporting bugs in Google apps and software. The goal of the program is simple: encourage researchers to report issues so that we can fix them quickly and keep users’ data secure. We also provide financial rewards for bug reporters, ranging from $100 to $200,000, based on the risk level of their discovery.
Since 2015, we’ve taken a look back at what VRP researchers have done to help make Google users safer. Here’s 2018, by the numbers:
Read full article: Google Blog
