Last year, you may remember that someone briefly bought and owned the domain, Google.com. As it was up for renewal and Google didn’t renew it quickly enough so someone was able to snag it. It turned that someone was actually an ex-Googler. He handed the domain back over to Google without any issues though. Since then, Google hasn’t said a word about the issue that led this person to owning that domain for even a short period of time. However, they released a blog post yesterday talking about security rewards for 2015. In which they paid out over $2 million in rewards in 2015 and over $6 million since 2010.
The person that bought the domain, Sanmay Ved, had decided that he was going to donate his reward to charity. The reward was $6006.13, which spells “Google” in numbers. Pretty Google-y of Google, right? However, once Google found out that Ved would be donating his reward to charity, Google decided to double the reward. That’s good-guy Google right there. Ved, when the reward was paid out, declined to state how much Google was giving him, but did say that it was “over $10,000”. And now we have a bit more of an accurate number for that. Not a bad way to spend over ten grand, right?
Google is always looking out to make sure security is nice and tight. While there will always be security holes found in software and such, it’s still great to see Google working to patch them up, and actually paying those that found those vulnerabilities, as they should be doing. In 2015, while they paid out over $2 million in reward, they were over 750 individual rewards. Obviously some were bigger than others. And the bigger the security threat or bug, the bigger the amount you get in reward cash from Google. Now, it may look a bit odd that Google paid out $2 million last year, but over five years it was just $6 million, and that was due to Android joining the Security Reward initiative in 2015. And as you can imagine that definitely brought in a lot more rewards that needed to be paid out – especially with all of the vulnerabilities found in 2015 which led to the monthly security updates we get today.