Microsoft bug bounty program started last year as a way to encourage researchers to develop new offensive and defensive techniques. Katie Moussouris, the security strategist at Microsoft responsible for the program s creation, said that while rewarding researchers for innovative work was a key goal. Microsoft wanted to make that option more attractive by offering bounties of up to $100,000 for novel offensive techniques that can bypass the exploit mitigations in the latest version of Windows. The company already has paid one bounty and recently expanded the field of eligible participants to include forensics teams and incident responders.
Source: https://threatpost.com/bugging-the-bug-market/104150/