Kaspersky Lab has launched a bug bounty programme with HackerOne, initially offering up to $50,000 rewards to security researchers.

The bounty rewards will be available to researchers identifying vulnerabilities in the Russian company’s consumer and business products, Kaspersky Internet Security and Kaspersky Endpoint Security respectively.

In scope will be local privilege escalation, unauthorised access of user data, and remote code execution flaws in each product.

Kaspersky Lab’s online services, websites and other network services are out of scope.

The programme, which will run for six months, aims to improve Kaspersky Lab’s relationships with external security researchers.

Upon completion of the preliminary phase, Kaspersky Lab will assess the results to identify which other products and rewards should be included in the second phase of the programme.

Kaspersky Lab chief technology officer Nikita Shvetsov said:Our bug bounty programme will help amplify the current internal and external mitigation measures we use to continuously improve the resiliency of our products.

We think it’s time for all security companies, large and small, to work more closely with external security researchers by embracing bug bounty programs as an effective and necessary tool to help keep their products secure and their customers protected.”

Several companies have offered bounty rewards in recent years for finding flaws in their systems.

Last June, LinkedIn paid out more than $65,000 (£41,000) in private bug bounty prizes after 65 flaws were reported to the professional social network.

Microsoft has also launched a bug bounty programme in 2014 in a bid to fix software vulnerabilities in Trustworthy Computing department.