Google doubles: $ 100,000 if you can hack Chromebook

Google has doubled the prize for hackers, and security researchers are able to circumvent the protections of the Chromebook in Guest mode. No one has succeeded in 2015, so the company wants to give 50,000 more reasons to do so.

The hunt for bugs is a very rewarding practice for security researchers as a key to find vulnerabilities of various types of software. A practice that, in the case of the bug research program on the Chromebook, has become even more profitable, twice to be exact. In the past few days Google has expanded the Chrome Reward Program with two changes: doubled the maximum award for security researchers, and added a new size.

Over the past six years, Google has paid more than $6 million to several security researchers, including more than 2 million last year alone. The company uses the so-called bug bounty programs parallel to those seeking inner vulnerability.

Pay external researchers helps individuals or groups of hackers not only to discover security flaws in its application code, but also to notify them to the company instead of using them with malicious purposes or sell them to third parties.

The Google last year introduced a prize of $50,000 to anyone who was able to permanently compromise a Chromebook in Guest mode, but since then no one has responded to the company’s call. No hacker or security researcher, in other words, managed to penetrate the defenses of the Mountain View system in the required manner, or probably those who have tried it was not sufficiently motivated to do so.

Just to give you one more reason (or 50,000 reasons, to be exact) Google has doubled in size, which last year represented the highest honor within the program. Who can bring down a Chromebook in Guest Mode can now receive $100,000 from Google: ” Large research deserve big rewards, so we’re putting on the plate a six-figure sum, ” the company said in announcing the new program.

The company also added a call cuts ” Download Protection Bypass “, or rewards for anyone who can discover methods to circumvent the security features download the Safe Browsing mode of the Chrome browser. Among the rules to be observed, there are several, and they are not allowed tricks to bypass mode or procedures too cumbersome unlikely the user is running on your machine.

More details about the new Google initiatives for hunting down bugs can be found on this page.