Posted by Anna Hupa,  Marc Henson, and Martin Straka, Google VRP Team 
Our Abuse Bug Bounty program has proved tremendously successful in the past three years since its introduction – thanks to our incredibly engaged community of researchers. Their contributions resulted in +1,000 valid bugs, helping us raise the bar in combating product abuse.

As a result of this continued success, today we are announcing a new experimental Abuse Research Grants Program in addition to the already existing Vulnerability Research Grants. Similar to other Research Grant Programs, these grants are up-front awards that our top researchers will receive before they ever submit a bug.

Last year, we increased our rewards to recognize the important work of our community. The growth of this program would not have been possible without partners like David (@xdavidhu), Zohar (ehpus.com), and Ademar (@nowaskyjr) who, on top of becoming our top research experts in Product Abuse, regularly contribute to transparency by sharing their work, further inspiring and influencing our community of researchers.

Despite the growth and success of this program, there remains more work to be done.

With our new Abuse Research Grants Program, we hope to bring even more awareness to product abuse by connecting more closely with our experienced researchers – so we can all work together to overcome these challenges, prevent product abuse and keep our users safe. Here’s how the program works:

• We invite our top abuse researchers to the program.
• We award grants immediately before research begins, no strings attached.
• Bug Hunters apply for the targets we share with them and start their research.
• On top of the grant, researchers are eligible for regular rewards for the bugs they discover in scope of our Bug Bounty program.