AVAST Doubles Bug Bounty Rewards, Pays As Much as $10K for Bugs

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 07 Feb 2014

About a year after the launch of its Bug Bounty Program, security company AVAST, with the aim of encouraging further research, updated the rules of the program.

As part of this update, AVAST doubled the bug bounty rewards. The base payment went up from $200 to $400. For reporting a serious bug as part of the Avast Bug Bounty Program, you could earn as much as $10,000.

Back in January 2013, security company AVAST introduced the Avast Bug Bounty Program and invited the user community to help find security-related bugs that plague consumer Windows versions of AVAST products. The company explained at the time that it is mainly interested in these types of bugs: remote code execution, local privilege escalation, DoS, escapes from the avast! Sandbox, certain scanner bypasses. The company also explained that the base payment is $200 per bug and that remote code execution bugs will pay at last $3,000 – $5,000 or more.

It’s been about a year since the launch of the Avast Bug Bounty Program. During this time, about 100 submissions were recorded, 25 submissions earned about $10,000 total, and 1 critical bug was rewarded $3,000.

It’s been a successful year for the Avast Bug Bounty Program and the company wants it to be even more successful. That is why this week AVAST updated the program.

The main change is that the bug bounty rewards have been doubled. The base payment went up from $200 to $400; and the top payment, which is awarded for critical bugs, goes up to $10,000 per one submission.
The secondary change is that Sandbox or DeepScreen escapes have been removed from the list of bugs that can earn a reward as part of the Avast Bug Bounty Program. “The reason for this is that we are focusing on a new technology that should eradicate Sandbox escapes entirely,” explained Robert Zacek, Director of Research at AVAST Software.

Additional information on the Avast Bug Bounty Program is available here.



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