Internet Explorer 11 is shaping up to be a major new release of the company’s flagship browser. Microsoft is all set to bring support for modern new web technologies in this new version, which is on track to make its debut with Windows 8.1 later this year.
The software titan recently announced the first bug bounty program for Windows 8.1 Preview and Internet Explorer 11, with promises of up to $11,000 for every security flaw engineers find in its upcoming browser.
And in a recently published post, Katie Moussouris, a senior security strategist at Microsoft confirms that the company has already paid one security engineer for finding a glitch in Internet Explorer 11:
“The security community has responded enthusiastically to our new bounty programs, submitting over a dozen issues for us to investigate in just the first two weeks since the programs opened. I personally notified the very first bounty recipient via email today that his submission for the Internet Explorer 11 Preview Bug Bounty is confirmed and validated.”
Redmond did not actually provide any specifics at that time, but Moussouris did however mention the name of the lucky winner in a short tweet a few days later.
And the chap is Ivan Fratric — the same guy that also won $50,000 back in 2012 in Microsoft’s BlueHat contest. And amusingly, Ivan is a Google information security engineer.
Moussouris went on to say that the feedback to Microsoft’s new bug bounty program has been absolutely fantastic, and many more engineers who have participated and unearthed flaws will soon be notified about their prizes in the weeks to come:
“We have other researchers who have qualified for bounties under the IE11 program as well, and their notifications will be coming from secure [at] Microsoft [dot] com this week and beyond. We plan to add an acknowledgement page on our bounty web site, listing the researchers who would like to be publicly recognized for their contributions to helping us make our products more secure.”
The bug bounty program for Internet Explorer 11 Preview, on the other hand, will officially end much sooner — July 26 to be exact, and Microsoft urges everyone that wants to participate in the contest to submit any issues they detect as soon as possible.
