A year ago at the Black Hat 2011 event, Microsoft announced the Blue Hat Prize. The goal is simple: It motivates security researchers to come up with a new defensive technology for Windows.
At the 2012 Black Hat conference, Microsoft followed up with a new set of Blue Hat prizes that included one winner and a pair of runners up. These researchers all produced technology that could serve to eliminate an entire class of attack against Windows.
On July 26, Microsoft awarded the top prize of $200,000 to researcher Vasilis for his tool called kBouncer. Other researchers receiving prizes were Ivan Frantric, who won $50,000 for ROPGuard, and Jared DeMott, who won $10,000 for /ROP.
“We put out a challenge with Blue Hat, and we didn’t want to be reactive,” Yunsun Wee, director, Incident Response Communication for Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft, told InternetNews. “We got security researchers to focus on defense instead of one-off vulnerabilities.”
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Microsoft 2012 Blue Hat Security Prizes Total $260,000
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.