Samsung will reward those who manage to hack its products

Samsung wants to make sure that its smartphones, such as the Galaxy S8, S8 Plus and the Galaxy Note 8, are safe to use by the public. To that end, the company revealed a new effort today designed to find and eliminate any security threats to its mobile devices before they are exploited by hackers.

The Samsung Mobile Security Rewards Program is offering research teams bounty money if they find any issues in their smartphone products. Samsung started a pilot program back in January 2016 to test the waters ahead of today’s more public launch. This new effort will cover all of the company’s mobile devices that are currently supported with monthly and quarterly security patches. At the moment, 38 Samsung devices are eligible for this program.

In addition to smartphones, Samsung will also offer reward money to firms that find security flaws in some of its software programs, including its Bixby digital assistant. Bounties will also be given out for flaws that are discovered in Samsung Account, Samsung Pay and Samsung Pass. Depending on the severity of the issues that is discovered by a security firm, they could receive up to $200,000 from Samsung for their efforts.

It will be interesting to see if this new bounty program will result in more secure phones from Samsung. There are already similar programs in effect from companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft that offer money for finding bugs and security issues on their software products.