Microsoft said on Tuesday it is paying a well-known hacking expert more than $100,000 for finding security holes in its software, one of the largest such bounties awarded to date by a high-tech company. The software maker also released a much anticipated update to Internet Explorer, which it said fixes a bug that made users of the world’s most popular browser vulnerable to remote attack. James Forshaw, who heads vulnerability research at London-based security consulting firm Context Information Security, won Microsoft’s first $100,000 bounty for identifying a new “exploitation technique” in Windows, which will allow it to develop defenses against an entire class of attacks, the software maker said on Tuesday. Forshaw earned another $9,400 for identifying security bugs in a preview release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 11 browser.
