Microsoft Paid Out $2.3 Million at Zero Day Quest 2026 Hacking Contest

Microsoft has announced the results of its Zero Day Quest 2026 live hacking contest. The tech giant offered a $5 million prize pool, with $2.3 million awarded to participants across 700 submissions. White hat hackers from over 20 countries took part in the event.  The company said Zero Day Quest 2026 has helped it learn about 80 high-impact vulnerabilities affecting cloud and AI services. “Many of the findings showed how weaknesses in identity controls or tenant isolation could allow issues identified within authorized test environments to impact other tenants if combined with execution or network-level vulnerabilities,” Microsoft explained. It noted that researchers “identified critical paths involving credential exposure, SSRF chains, and cross‑tenant access”. “These findings reinforce the need for layered defenses and strong isolation boundaries across Microsoft’s cloud and AI services, and underscore the importance of addressing upstream control gaps earlier in the development lifecycle in alignment with Secure Future Initiative priorities,” the company said. At Zero Day Quest 2025, Microsoft paid out $1.6 million to participants.  In August 2025, Microsoft announced that it had paid out $17 million in bug bounties in the past year, bringing the total payouts since 2018 to more than $92 million. Related: Infotainment, EV Charger Exploits Earn Hackers $1M at Pwn2Own Automotive 2026 Related: Pwn2Own WhatsApp Hacker Says Exploit Privately Disclosed to Meta Related: $320,000 Paid Out at Zeroday.Cloud for Open Source Software Exploits WRITTEN BY Eduard Kovacs Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is senior managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher before starting a career in journalism in 2011. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering. More from Eduard Kovacs $10 Domain Could Have Handed Hackers 25k Endpoints, Including in OT and Gov Networks ICS Patch Tuesday: 8 Industrial Giants Publish New Security Advisories Microsoft Patches Exploited SharePoint Zero-Day and 160 Other Vulnerabilities Adobe Patches 55 Vulnerabilities Across 11 Products Europe’s Largest Gym Chain Says Data Breach Impacts 1 Million Members Nightclub Giant RCI Hospitality Reports Data Breach Booking.com Says Hackers Accessed User Information OpenAI Impacted by North Korea-Linked Axios Supply Chain Hack Latest News Splunk Enterprise Update Patches Code Execution Vulnerability NIST Prioritizes NVD Enrichment for CVEs in CISA KEV, Critical Software Cisco Patches Critical Vulnerabilities in Webex, ISE Ransomware Hits Automotive Data Expert Autovista Claude Code, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot Agents Vulnerable to Prompt Injection via Comments Sweden Blames Pro-Russian Group for Cyberattack Last Year on Its Energy Infrastructure Exploited Vulnerability Exposes Nginx Servers to Hacking Capsule Security Emerges From Stealth With $7 Million in Funding Trending Webinar: A Step-By-Step Approach To AI Governance April 28, 2026 With "Shadow AI" usage becoming prevalent in organizations, learn how to balance the need for rapid experimentation with the rigorous controls required for enterprise-grade deployment. Register Virtual Event: Threat Detection And Incident Response Summit May 20, 2026 Delve into big-picture strategies to reduce attack surfaces, improve patch management, conduct post-incident forensics, and tools and tricks needed in a modern organization. Register People on the Move ThreatModeler has appointed Kevin Gallagher as Chief Executive Officer. Thomas Bain has been appointed Chief Marketing Officer at Silent Push. The United States Department of War appointed David Vaughn as Technical Advisor for Data Infrastructure. More People On The Move Expert Insights The Hidden ROI Of Visibility: Better Decisions, Better Behavior, Better Security Beyond monitoring and compliance, visibility acts as a powerful deterrent, shaping user behavior, improving collaboration, and enabling more accurate, data-driven security decisions. (Joshua Goldfarb) The New Rules Of Engagement: Matching Agentic Attack Speed The cybersecurity response to AI-enabled nation-state threats cannot be incremental. It must be architectural. (Nadir Izrael) The Next Cybersecurity Crisis Isn’t Breaches—It’s Data You Can’t Trust Data integrity shouldn’t be seen only through the prism of a technical concern but also as a leadership issue. (Steve Durbin) Why Agentic AI Systems Need Better Governance – Lessons From OpenClaw Agentic AI platforms are shifting from passive recommendation tools to autonomous action-takers with real system access, (Etay Maor) The Human IOC: Why Security Professionals Struggle With Social Vetting Applying SOC-level rigor to the rumors, politics, and 'human intel' can make or break a security team. (Joshua Goldfarb) Flipboard Reddit Whatsapp Email