Sony PlayStation 4 has a new bud bounty program. The Japanese company has announced that ethical hackers who manage to find critical bugs in the PlayStation 4 or PlayStation Network can be rewarded up to $50,000 (slightly below ₹38 lakh). The company has paired up with security platform HackerOne to make this bug bounty programme possible.
“We are inviting the security research community, gamers, and anyone else to test the security of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Network,” Sony said in a statement this week.
While finding bugs in the PS4 can earn hackers $50,000, users who are able to find vulnerabilities within the PlayStation network will be able to earn $3,000.
Sony will award a bounty to the first hacker who reports a previously unreported vulnerability.
“To date, we have been running our bug bounty programme privately with some researchers,” informed Sony.
” I’m happy to announce that we have started a public PlayStation Bug Bounty programme because the security of our products is a fundamental part of creating amazing experiences for our community,” said Geoff Norton, Senior Director Software Engineering, Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE).
The hackers on security platform HackerOne have managed to earn a total of $100 million via bug bounties which the company claims is a growth of 85.6% in comparison to last year’s bounties. Covid-19 also increased the total bounty payments by 17.5%.
Till date, ethical hackers in the global community have managed to expose over 1,70,000 vulnerabilities within 2,000 bounty programmes. Making the bounty programme public helps in changing the organisation’s solutions to security issues.
With Inputs from IANS
