Our vulnerability reward programs have been very successful in helping us fix more bugs and better protect our users, while also strengthening our relationships with security researchers. Since introducing our reward program for web properties in November 2010, we’ve received over 1,500 qualifying vulnerability reports that span across Google’s services, as well as software written by companies we have acquired. We’ve paid $828,000 to more than 250 individuals, some of whom have doubled their total by donating their rewards to charity. For example, one of our bug finders decided to support a school project in East Africa.

In recognition of the difficulty involved in finding bugs in our most critical applications, we’re once again rolling out updated rules and significant reward increases for another group of bug categories:
  • Cross-site scripting (XSS) bugs on https://accounts.google.com now receive a reward of $7,500 (previously $3,133.7). Rewards for XSS bugs in other highly sensitive services such as Gmail and Google Wallet have been bumped up to $5,000 (previously $1,337), with normal Google properties increasing to $3,133.70 (previously $500).
  • The top reward for significant authentication bypasses / information leaks is now $7,500 (previously $5,000).
As always, happy bug hunting! If you do find a security problem, please let us know.