Microsoft Corp has said that it is paying a well-known hacking expert James Forshaw more than $100,000 for finding security holes in its software, one of the largest such bounties awarded to date by a high-tech company.
The software maker also released a much anticipated update to Internet Explorer, which it said fixes a bug that made users of the world’s most popular browser vulnerable to remote attack.
James Forshaw, who heads vulnerability research at London-based security consulting firm Context Information Security, won Microsoft’s first $100,000 bounty for identifying a new “exploitation technique” in Windows, which will allow it to develop defenses against an entire class of attacks, the software maker said on Tuesday.
Forshaw earned another $9,400 for identifying security bugs in a preview release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 11 browser, Katie Moussouris, senior security strategist with Microsoft Security Response Center, said in a blog.
Microsoft unveiled the reward programs four months ago to bolster efforts to prevent sophisticated attackers from subverting new security technologies in its software, which runs on the vast majority of the world’s personal computers.
