Three tech giants have teamed up to offer bounties to "friendly hackers" for hunting down Internet bugs.
Rivals Microsoft, Google and Facebook have set aside their differences in the interest of a "safer Internet" and are teaming up to fight hackers by offering cash rewards to friendly hackers who can help locate critical vulnerabilities.
"It is meant for those very, very severe bugs that would have dire consequence for the Internet if they were to get into the wrong hands," said Facebook Product Security Lead Alex Rice.
The bug bounty programme is dubbed HackerOne and the bounties or cash rewards are between $300 to $5000 and depend on the nature of the problem. The reward can be higher, depending on the decision of the review panel.
The review panel comprises of experts from Microsoft, Facebook, Google, security consulting firm iSEC Partners and online marketplace Etsy.
Details of HackerOne can be found at here.
The tech rivals have teamed up to ward off product bugs and thwart efforts from hackers, despite intense competition with each other.
"Even if we are fierce competitors... the security teams don't have to be competitors," Rice said. "Our competition is the bad guys."
The HackerOne program is open to everyone except those from countries like Cuba, Iran, Syria and North Korea with whom the U.S. has trade restrictions.
Children too are eligible to join; however, they will be required to claim their bounties from their parents.
Additionally, Microsoft too has an independent bounty program and it has raised the prize fund to $100,000 recently. We recently reported that Microsoft had announced that a security gap in Windows made it vulnerable to the zero-day exploit or bug by hackers.
The flaw meant that anyone opening a malware-packed TIFF image would have a malicious code installed on their PC without being aware of the same.
