US rivals team up in offering bounties to secure Internet

Three fierce Internet rivals are teaming up to fight hackers by offering bounties, or cash rewards, to researchers who find critical vulnerabilities in widely used Web technology.

The program is sponsored by Facebook and Microsoft with assistance from a Google security expert, who helped develop the program and will sit on the panel that will evaluate submissions. The bounties in this program range from $300 to $5,000 depending on the nature of the problem found. The rewards can go higher at the discretion of a review panel. Submissions for the Internet Bug Bounty will be evaluated by a panel of experts from Facebook, Microsoft, Google, the security consulting firm iSEC Partners and Etsy, an online handcraft marketplace.