US tech rivals Facebook, Microsoft and Google have teamed up to combat hackers by offering cash rewards to researchers who discover web vulnerabilities.
The Facebook and Microsoft funded programme will be carried out with a Google ink security expert, who helped develop the program and will sit on the panel to evaluate submissions.
The bounties range from $300 to $5,000 depending on the nature of the problem discovered.
Facebook product security lead Alex Rice told Reuters: "It is meant for those very, very severe bugs that would have dire consequence for the Internet if they were to get into the wrong hands.
"Even if we are fierce competitors… the security teams don’t have to be competitors.
"Our competition is the bad guys."
Microsoft also extended its own bounty programme by offering up to $100,000 to professionals who expose new techniques to hack into its Windows security programme.
In October, UK security researcher James Forshaw won the first Microsoft $100,000 bounty for New Mitigation Bypass Techniques, while Google also revealed plans to expand its bug bounty rewards programme.
In September, Facebook awarded an Indian electronics and communications engineer, Arul Kumar, $12,500 in bounty for uncovering a vulnerability that allowed hackers to delete user photos.
