If there’s one that that is integral to the operation of Google.com it is their domain name. Sure, they have .co.uk and a whole host of others from around the world, but owning their own .com is a vital part of their search engine and the hub for the US version of the world’s most popular search engine. So you would think they would keep it paid for and up to date right? Well, last October saw ex-Google employee Sanmay Ved managing to purchase the domain when Google forgot to renew it; I think whoops would be an understatement!
Fortunately for Google, Sanmay isn’t a bad guy and actually did them a bit of a favour, as anyone with darker intentions could have really caused them a bit of a headache, albeit for a short-lived time. When it was realised what had happened, Google reversed the transaction and Sanmay shared his endeavours via LinkedIn. Shortly afterwards, he was contacted by the team at Google Security to offer him a reward for snapping it up, but they didn’t reveal how much he was paid, only commenting that it was offered “in a very Googley way.”
Now it seems that vague comment makes a lot more sense, as it was revealed that Google Security not only paid out a nice sum of money for his reward, but it was about as “Googly” a number as you could come up with. They paid him $6,006.13, which was you can see looks a bit like $G,OOG,LE.
That’s a pretty sweet reward for a minutes work, but as I said before, Ved is a nice guy and donated the money he received to charity, at which point Google immediately doubled the total for him to donate. So it seems a lot of good came out of this little security blunder after all.
