Google has announced a hacking challenge with close to $3 million in prizes to see if computer whizzes can infiltrate Chrome OS software.
The California-based company will hold a contest called "Pwnium" in March, when hackers can compete to breach either the HP Chromebook 11 or the Acer C720 Chromebook, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The contest's prizes, which will be handed out in rewards of $110,000 and $150,000 each, will total $2.71828 million, a figure that references a mathematical concept vital for coding.
Hackers must thoroughly infiltrate the computers to earn the prizes. They will need to hack Chrome OS through an Internet page to win a $110,000 reward.
For the $150,000 prizes, hackers need to breach the computer to the extent that they can still control the device even after rebooting, according to the L.A. Times.
Especially savvy hackers could earn bonus prizes from Google for clever hacks.
The contest, which will be held at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada, isn't the first such competition for the tech giant.
"Google has held such contests before as a way to entice hackers to find security holes and present them to the company upfront, rather than disturb users and the company by performing their hack at a random time," according to the L.A. Times.
In light of the many recent hacking jobs, Google's contest is a wise move.
Snapchat, a Los Angeles-based startup that is still profitless, recently suffered a major security breach that compromised 4.6 million usernames and numbers.
A group of hackers exposed the numbers, blurring the final two digits of each, in a self-titled effort to "raise awareness of the site's security issues," the Daily Mail reported.
In another incident, more than 2 million Facebook, Twitter and Google passwords leaked in December through users' computers that were infected by a virus.
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