Samsung to pay you for finding vulnerabilities in their devices

Almost all devices are vulnerable to some sort of issues including hacking. Apple, for instance, has faced several issues with hackers being able to access and leak celebrity photos saved in ICloud. No device is immune to this kind of vulnerabilities. The only way companies can protect themselves from this kind of mismanagement is by noticing vulnerabilities beforehand and creating software patches or updating their devices.

Just recently, a new vulnerability was found in voice assistants such as Siri, Google now and Amazon Alexa. The vulnerability is that these "assistants" can be secretly controlled by using inaudible ultrasonic sounds.

Samsung's History facing vulnerabilities

Samsung, as a manufacturer of millions of smart phones, is responsible for securing huge amounts of user data. Samsung has often been scrutinized for not providing even the simplest software or security updates for most their low/mid-end devices while bombarding their high-end devices with a ton of security features. Since October 2015, Samsung has released security updates for all their high-end phone every month.

Samsung ensures the safety of their device users with Samsung Knox, a software and cloud based feature which not only protects the user data, but also the hardware. As in, the device would be able to detect if there has been any change in hardware, such as a different finger print sensor, etc. Samsung Knox can recognize if the software has been tampered or hardware and could deactivate features such as Samsung Pay to protect user data.

On the hardware side, Samsung has implemented finger print scanner, an Iris scanner, face recognition, etc., as ways to secure data on their devices. All there features have been scrutinized by security experts on a range of devices for not being safe enough.

The Rewards Program

To further battle and find out vulnerabilities, Samsung is seeking out help from the public community to figure out possible threats and vulnerabilities. The program specifically focuses on finding vulnerabilities of latest Samsung services including Bixby, Samsung Account, Samsung Pay and Samsung Pass, among others and is centered sound for 38* Samsung devices.

To encourage people to join this program, Samsung is willing to pay up to 200,000 USD, depending on the severity of a given threat, as well as the researcher’s ability to provide proof of concept.