Michael Crider
Bug bounties are nothing new: they’re a great way for companies to find problems and proactively fix them, by passing out a relatively small amount of money to indie security researchers. Sony’s joining the fun with a new program, specifically targeting the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Network.
Sony is teaming up with HackerOne, a security organizer that’s no stranger to bug bounties. Sony says it has dabbled in bug bounties before, but behind closed doors with only select researchers. Now that it’s wide open for anyone to track down critical vulnerabilities, Sony is hoping for a much effective democratized bounty program.
On the PlayStation HackerOne page, bounties for the PS4 start at $500 and go up to a whopping $50,000 for critical bugs. PlayStation Network bounties top out at just $3,000—odd, since I’ve generally found PSN to be a lot less reliable than the hardware component. HackerOne says that each category is a “minimum,” so the biggest bounties could be even higher.
Source: PlayStation Blog via IBT
