Sony's New Bug Bounty Program Offers $50,000 Or More For Finding "Critical Vulnerabilities"

Sony has today announced a brand new Bug Bounty Program, to help the company identify and solve flaws in the PlayStation 4. If you discover a "critical" vulnerability to the system, you could be in line for a reward of $50,000.

This new program was announced earlier today through the PlayStation Blog by Sony. To kickstart the new rewards program, Sony is partnering with HackerOne, an existing bug bounty platform that helps companies around the world identify problems with their systems.

"Critical vulnerabilities for PS4 have bounties starting at $50,000," Sony's senior software engineer Geoff Norton writes on the PlayStation Blog. "We recognize the valuable role that the research community plays in enhancing security, so we're excited to announce our program for the broader community."

Over on the HackerOne website, you can find different bounty tiers for the program. The bounties relating to the PlayStation Network start at $100 and go up to $3,000, and bounties for the PS4 hardware start at $500 and rise to a potential $50,000. You'll only get the bounty if you report a previously unreported problem that no one else has found, of course.

Earlier this year, Microsoft launched their Xbox Bounty Program. Bounties for the Xbox One can be rewarded with a potential $20,000 payout, which actually matches Nintendo's bounty program for their Nintendo Switch. This is all dwarfed considerably by Microsoft's Windows 10 Security Bug Program, which can pay out a massive $250,000 at the highest tier.