Qualcomm's been bitten by the bounty bug, signing on with HackerOne to offer up to US$15,000 for vulnerabilities in modems and processors.

The bounty covers Snapdragon 400, 615, 801, 805 808, 810, 820 and 821 processors, and its X5, X7, X12 and X16 LTE modems.

A vulnerability in any one of these would reach a long way into the wild. The Snapdragon X20, to pick one example, is in current-generation smartphones from Google, Samsung, Motorola, LG, ZTE, Sony, Asus, HTC, and HP.

Because the company has about 65 per cent of the LTE market, the Quadrooter bug that landed during Def Con in August was thought to affect up to 900 million devices.

Qualcomm's note at HackerOne gives white hats a pretty wide brief: Linux kernel code 3.14 or newer in the Android for MSM project, written by the Qualcomm Innovation Center and not in an end-of-life branch.

There are also rewards for bootloader bugs, anything that has root or system, privileges, the modem, networking firmware (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), or the Qualcomm Secure Execution on Trustzone.

Merely crashing a process isn't enough; the bug has to then let the attacker get to code execution. ®