A teenager who discovered a security hole in Windows and worked with Redmond for six months to fix the problem has received his reward from the multi-billion dollar company: a mere note of thanks on its website.
\n19-year-old Matt Thompson from Aberdeen was newly employed with a local IT firm after leaving college when he discovered the security hole in the Jet Database Engine – which if exploited would have let hackers take control of a user’s PC and given virus writers reason to smile.<\/p>\n
He stumbled across the error while working on a database project for a client and, after crashing a server, realised something was amiss.
\nAfter several calls to various helpdesks with Thompson explaining that he wasn’t a domestic user with a toolbar problem but had actually found a security error that needed fixing, Microsoft took his complaints seriously.
\nHalf a year of code-swapping and collaboration later and the problem was sorted, with Thompson being sworn to secrecy over his security sleuthing achievements.<\/p>\n
Gates and co issued the now-customary update and let customers know, but when the dust had settled, instead of bunging the teenage boffin a few quid from the bulging Microsoft coffers for his work, the software firm took a more low-key approach to their security saviour’s work.<\/p>\n
It added his name to the list of special acknowledgements on the corporate site.<\/p>\n
While, according to reports, Thompson is quite chuffed to have worked with the software giant, many people have been left wondering if a company that can absorb a ?497m fine without breaking stride could have given the tech whizzkid a few bob for his trouble.<\/p>\n
Especially since Thompson could no doubt have made a not-insubstantial wad of cash from flogging the details of the security to hole to a virus writer or two.<\/p>\n
more from [url=http:\/\/www.silicon.com\/software\/security\/0,39024655,39120038,00.htm]Silicon[\/url]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
19-year-old raises the alarm over security hole and is rewarded with precisely $0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-m"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bBYZ-2G","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}