Google Paid $410,000 for Chrome Bugs
Google's bug bounty program, which pays monetary rewards for the discovery of vulnerabilities in Chome, has been a runaway success, according to the company.
Since November 2010, when Goggle began offering cash for bug reports, the company said it paid more than $410,000 to more than 200 individuals who found more than 1100 "legitimate issues" and 730 that qualified for a reward. An additional $19,000 was paid to charities chosen by bug reporters.
The "vast majority" of bug reports were motivated by the potential reward to disclose their discovery. So, even if Google paid more than $400,000, this seems to be a bargain when compared to the potential damage just one bug could have caused.
"It’s not all about money, though," wrote Adam Mein, technical program manager of Google's Security Team in a blog post. "Google has gotten better and stronger as a result of this work. We get more bug reports, which means we get more bug fixes, which means a safer experience for our users."
Google also disclosed that about half of all bugs found were located in software provided by companies that Google had acquired.
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Douglas Perry was a freelance writer for Tom's Hardware covering semiconductors, storage technology, quantum computing, and processor power delivery. He has authored several books and is currently an editor for The Oregonian/OregonLive.
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d-isdumb The salary for one good programmer and one person could not find all the bugs found by the numerous programmers/users who found them. I say Google did a smart move. The linux community does the same thing but no one gets paid.Reply -
JDFan Just makes you wonder if they continue the program -- How many of their programmers will start to intentionally slip bugs into the coding for their "Friends" to find for some extra income !!Reply -
guru_urug In other news, greedy apple wont pay its actual production employees more than a few $ a day.Reply -
danwat1234 Chrome is so nice in that it uses both cores of my CPU whereas firefox just uses 1 core to render all tabs.Reply