Google Paid A Hacker $112,500 For Finding A Bug That Could Hack Your Android
Google Paid A Hacker $112,500 For Finding A Bug That Could Hack Your Android: Hacking is not illegal, we have seen white hat hackers earning some handsome amount of money by finding security loopholes on various platforms. For those White hat hackers, several tech giants like Microsoft, Google have bug bounty programmes which give rewards to security researchers.
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If we look around, Bug bounty programs are popular among all tech companies. If we talk about search giant Google, the bug bounty programme of Google pays up to $200,000 for finding a bug in the Android operating system.
Recently, the search giant Google has awarded $112,500 to a white hat hacker for exposing a severe flaw in Google Pixel smartphones. The security researcher, Guang Gong works for Qihoo 360 Technology’s Alpha team and he reported a critical remote exploit chain flaw which affects Pixel smartphones.
Guang Gong had reported the existing flaw in Google’s Android Security Rewards program way back in August 2017. He exposed two separate bugs CVE-2017-5116 and CVE-2017-14904. These bugs can be used together to inject code into Pixel smartphones or any other Android’s system_server process whenever victim clicks a malicious URL in Chrome.
If a victim clicks on the malicious URL from Google Chrome browser, hackers get full control to push additional malware, spy on them or even hack the smartphone completely. The security researcher was awarded $105,000 for finding the bugs and also received a bonus of $7500 which makes it the total of $112,500.
According to the search giant Google, this was the highest reward in the history of the Android security program. The search giant already patched the bug in December’s security update before the announcement was made public.
