Silicon Valley companies regularly offer bounties to hackers that expose vulnerabilities in their software. Now Google is upping the ante by doubling the top prize to people who can hack the company’s Chromebook laptops.
Google said in a March 14 blog post that it’s dramatically increasing the top reward for Chromebook hacking, from $50,000 to $100,000. To claim the money, a coder must execute a “persistent compromise” of the Chromebook while it is in guest mode.
Essentially a person must hack into the system when it’s in a locked-down state to ensure user privacy. The compromise must still be executable even when the device is reset. No one has ever claimed the top prize.
In 2015, Google doled out more than $2 million overall to hackers found bugs across its services—including a $12,000 reward to the guy who managed to buy the domain Google.com out from under Google’s nose.
