Google dispenses first jackpot award to security bug hunter

Elite bug-finder handed $3,133.7(0) reward

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Applications, 13th January 2011 16:31 GMT

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Google updated its Chrome browser software on Wednesday to address a variety of security bugs, including the first vulnerability to qualify its finder for the recently introduced top-tier of its Chromium Security Reward scheme.

Sergey Glazunov earns an “elite” $3,133.7 award for his bug-finding efforts as well as pocketing the base-line $1,337 reward and other incentives for the discovery of lesser bugs, also resolved by the latest cross-platform browser security update.

Glazunov's major find was a crucial flaw involving a "pointer in speech handling". He also found four "high" risk vulnerabilities variously involving video and anchor handling as well as miscued pointers. In total the 8.0.552.237 release addresses one critical flaw, 13 "high-risk" bugs and two less severe medium-danger vulnerabilities, as detailed in Google's bulletin here. The ad broker paid a total of $14,000 in security awards to various researchers.

Google is withholding details of the respective bugs until users have a reasonable chance to apply security fixes – in case the added details might help the bad guys to develop workable exploits. ®

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