Microsoft will be awarding bounties to researchers who can find security vulnerabilities in their Windows 8.1 and Internet Explorer 11 products. The bounty program consists 3 categories: the Mitigation Bypass Bounty with a $100,000 award, BlueHat Bonus Defense with a $50,000 bounty and the IE 11 Preview Bounty awarding the lucky researcher $11,000. This initiative will see weaknesses in Windows 8.1 before it is released by the end of 2013 with the BlueHat Bonus expected to collect ideas on how to defend against vulnerabilities discovered in category one (Mitigation Bypass Bounty). The first 2 categories will run continuously while the IE category will only run between 26th June and 26th July this year.
