In August 2011, Microsoft announced a plan to offer a lot of money to developers that created better security programs. It launched the BlueHat prize as part of the annual Black Hat conference. This new competition was designed to give out a total of over $250,000 for “novel runtime mitigation technology designed to prevent the exploitation of memory safety vulnerabilities.”
Today, Microsoft announced that the three finalists, out of 20 official entries, in its first BlueHat competition have been selected. The finalists are Jared DeMott, Ivan Fratric and Vasilis Pappas. You can check out overviews of all their entries on the official BlueHat page. Microsoft said that half of the entries came in the final few days of the competition and some were submitted in the last few hours or even minutes of the deadline.
The person who wins the competition gets the top prize of $200,000 while the runner up gets $50,000. A second runner up will get a MSDN Universal subscription that’s valued at $10,000. The three finalists will learn who will win the big prize on July 26.
Microsoft added that this competition will help to improve online security, saying, "These defenses could help protect our own applications, and have the potential to protect third-party applications that run on our platform."
Source: Microsoft
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