Today’s topics include HP launching a bug bounty program to discover printer security flaws, and Microsoft raising Office 2019 prices by 10 percent starting Oct 1.
HP announced July 31 that it is teaming up with Bugcrowd on a bug bounty program that will award selected researchers between $500 and $10,000 for finding security flaws in a range of printers, including HP’s Enterprise LaserJet machines and multifunction printers, such as the A3 and A4.
Researchers who are invited to join the private program will have to report the vulnerabilities to Bugcrowd, which will verify the flaws and determine the award for each one, based on its severity.
According to Bugcrowd, “Bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure programs have the ability to bring together tens of thousands of the brightest minds in security research, to uncover seven times more high priority vulnerabilities than traditional assessment methods.”
Starting Oct. 1, Microsoft will raise the prices of the upcoming Office 2019 suite for enterprise customers by 10 percent, after eight years of unchanged prices since the company introduced Office 2010.
Microsoft said the price hike is part of price increases for many of its on-premises and cloud products, including a variety of existing volume discount plans and subscriptions. Among those changes are plans to remove the programmatic volume discounts in Enterprise Agreement subscriptions, while also making changes in Select, Select Plus and Open program offerings.
Changes will also come for on-premises and online services for government customers and for the Office client, Enterprise Client Access Licenses, Core CAL licenses and server products.