Facebook tonight awarded a $100,000 prize to a team of Georgia Tech researchers who found a new class of browser-based memory-corruption vulnerabilities and built a corresponding detection technique. The award brings the social media giant on par with Microsoft and its six-figure payouts for mitigation bypasses and new defensive techniques for those bypasses.
The award, Facebook’s Internet Defense Prize, was handed out at the USENIX Security Symposium in Washington, D.C., and doubles last year’s inaugural payout of $50,000. The prize is an effort to recognize and fund Internet security research in the areas of defense and protection, Facebook said.
“Security research in general celebrates offensive research and less attention is paid to people doing the nitty-gritty work required to keep systems safe and whole classes of vulnerabilities less likely to occur,” said Facebook security engineering manager Ioannis Papagiannis. “We look at work targeting meaningful bugs affecting a lot of people on the Internet.”
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