Google Really Wants Someone to Hack Chromebook

Not a single person has been able to, so the company has doubled the reward to $100K
By Elizabeth Armstrong Moore,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 16, 2016 5:13 AM CDT
Google Really Wants Someone to Hack Chromebook
This Tuesday, March 10, 2015 photo shows, from left, the USB Type-C port, two standard USB ports, and headphone jack on a Google Chromebook Pixel laptop, in San Jose, Calif.   (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

For six years Google has been leaning on some of the world's best hackers to find problems in a wide range of its products through its bug bounty program, paying $2 million to hundreds of winners last year alone. But after announcing a $50,000 reward for the persistent compromise of a Chromebook in guest mode last year, the company has yet to receive a single successful submission—so it has doubled its reward to $100,000 in the hopes that someone, anyone, can find bugs, reports VentureBeat.

"Great research deserves great awards, so we’re putting up a standing six-figure sum, available all year round with no quotas and no maximum reward pool," Google says in a statement. The company has already added several security measures to make Chromebooks more secure, reports PC World, including automatic software update downloads, verification boot-ups, and more. People can also win smaller rewards if they find ways to bypass Chrome’s Safe Browsing download protection features, which collects lists of URLs that contain malware or phishing content for several browsers and Internet service providers. (This guy has made six figures by exposing bugs.)

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