Facebook announces Internet Defense Prize

Facebook is working to make the Internet a more secure place. The company announced Thursday at the USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego the creation of the Internet Defense Prize — an award recognizing superior quality research that combines a working prototype with great contributions to securing the Internet.

Facebook and USENIX crowned the first winners today. Johannes Dahse and Thorsten Holz, two researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, were awarded $50,000 for their paper, “Static Detection of Second-Order Vulnerabilities in Web Applications.”

John “Four” Flynn, a security engineering manager at Facebook, discussed the Internet Defense Prize in a blog post:

Recently we started asking ourselves how we could do more to make the web secure and have a greater impact.