On June 24, PlayStation announced a collaboration with HackerOne, which is responsible for cybersecurity.
Under the program Bug Bounty, safety engineers and normal users will be able to test the integrity of PS4 and PSN protection systems and get paid for it. To be more precise, for detecting small breaches in the PSN, the company offers 100$. And for finding crucial vulnerabilities, you can get up to 50,000$ or so.
Sony noted that they are only interested in specific domains; for instance, the list of all transactions made and PS Store. Corporate IT-infrastructure and software from external third-party companies were not included in the list. Furthermore, there’s only PS4 mentioned – searching for vulnerabilities in PS1, PS2, PS3 and Vita are not rewarded.
According to Sony, they have already done the internal testing of the program and are ready to give such an opportunity to all users.
Sony is the last of the top-three huge corporations to acquire a public campaign to search for vulnerabilities. In 2016, Nintendo was the first to launch such a program, which prompted Microsoft to follow their example and offered a reward for each vulnerability found on Xbox. However, Sony is the most generous one – the maximum reward’s amount is considerably higher.
