Do you recall the Indian guy who owned Google for a minute? Well, Back in 2015, Sanmay Ved purchased Google for mere $12. He was searching for google domains and found that google.com is available for purchase. Without wasting any time, he purchased the domain for mere $12 and went on to access its webmaster tools. Sooner, Google realized and cancelled the sale.

For detecting such huge bug, Google awarded him with $6,006.13 (about Rs 4.07 lakh) . Later, they doubled the amount when they came to know that he donated the entire amount to charity.

Google said in a blog post, “You may have read about Sanmay Ved, a researcher who was able to buy Google.com for one minute on Google Domains. Our initial financial reward to Sanmay – $6,006.13 – spelled-out Google, numerically (squint a little and you’ll see it!). We then doubled this amount when Sanmay donated his reward to charity.”

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Sanmay said that it was never about money and he wanted the amount to be donated to Art of Living Foundation for an educational programme which runs 404 free schools across 18 states in India, providing free education to more than 39,200 children living in slums, tribal and rural belts where child labour and poverty are widespread.

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After this, Google paid attention to the major bugs that were unnoticed till date. Google then had researchers from all over the globe to participate in its security rewards programme.

The blog posted by Eduardo Vela Nava from Google Security team stated, “Tomasz Bojarski found 70 bugs on Google in 2015, and was our most prolific researcher of the year. He found a bug in our vulnerability submission form.”

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Google paid over $200,000 to researchers for their contribution to Google’s Android VRP Programme.

The search engine giant later said, “We also injected some new energy into these existing research programs and grants. In December, we announced that we’d be dedicating one million dollars specifically for security research related to Google Drive.”

Published by Kanika Saini on 08 Aug 2018