Google rewards students who discover security vulnerabilities with up to $10,000

Google has awarded a high school student $10,000 after he found a security vulnerability that hackers could use to access and steal confidential data.

Google offers a huge reward to anyone who discovers and reports a security vulnerability to the company.

According to Neowin, Ezequiel Pereira (Uruguay) explained in a blog post that one day he was bored and discovered a bug in Google. Specifically, Pereira tried to change the Host header in requests to the Google App Engine server using Burp, a tool used to test the security of web applications.

Most of Pereira’s attempts failed, mostly due to “404: Not found” messages or Google checking to see if he was using a Google account. However, when the student tried another website, none of the security measures were in place. The site redirected Pereira to various sections related to Google’s services and infrastructure.

Digging deeper, Pereira found a section called Google Confidential. After making the discovery, Pereira reported the issue to Google. A few hours later, he received a response from the company confirming the bug. In a notice sent to Pereira by Google, the company said that the site contained some technical information about Google servers, but nothing that was considered really important.

However, a few weeks later, Pereira received a report that showed his discovery was very important, when Google informed Pereira that he would receive $10,000 through the Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) for his security report.

Pereira was pleased to confirm that Google has fixed the issue, which helped the company discover the vulnerability that allowed attackers to access sensitive data.

According to TNO