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The Mozilla Foundation has given $2,500 (£1,328) to a security researcher for discovering vulnerabilities in its free Web browser.

The company paid $500 to German researcher Michael Krax for each of the five bugs he found in Firefox.

"We developed the bug bounty programme to encourage and award community members who identify unknown bugs in the software," said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation. "This programme is one of the many ways the Mozilla Foundation produces safe and secure software for its users."

Now that's what I call 'secure computing' ... not like MS climing to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars as bounty for anyone who helps trace virus writers .....


Complete Story available here

TofiBaba

In a similar news item DVForge offered a reward of $25k for writing a virus for Mac.
"Contest goal: To lay to rest, once and for all, the myths surrounding the lack of spreading computer virii on the Macintosh OS X operating system, by sponsoring a contest that challenges virus writers to actually prove that they can introduce a harmless virus into two modern OS X Macs"


This offer was later retracted:

http://www.dvforge.com/virus.shtml

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^ yeh ... I read that as well. The guy backed off due to legal implications .. chicken :-/