Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative Celebrates 20 Years of Industry Leadership

Bug bounty program incentivizes security research to make customers and industry safer

DALLAS, Aug. 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Global cybersecurity leader Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704) is celebrating the 20^th anniversary of its Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), the world's largest and most successful vendor-agnostic bug bounty program. Since 2005, the ZDI has incentivized the responsible disclosure of software vulnerabilities through bug bounty rewards and ethical hacking competitions around the world.

To learn more about the Trend Zero Day Initiative™, visit: https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/zero-day-initiative/about.html 

Kevin Simzer, COO at Trend: "Our top priority is empowering our customers to take a proactive approach to cybersecurity. The Zero Day Initiative is one of the best tools we have to stay ahead of cybercriminals, and it's one of a kind. Nobody else in the industry can protect their customers as far in advance as we do."

Trend ZDI is a leader in global vulnerability research and disclosure. In 2024 it helped to responsibly disclose 73% of all vulnerabilities—more than all other participating vendors combined, according to Omdia.

The research behind these newly discovered bugs ensures that Trend customers receive virtual patches against zero-day vulnerabilities. These virtual patches are available, on average, more than two months before official vendor updates are available.

But the ZDI doesn't just benefit Trend customers. It makes the digital world safer for everyone by ensuring software flaws are fixed by vendors before threat actors can exploit them. 

The program comes from humble beginnings, when it was launched in 2005 by TippingPoint, a division of 3Com. The idea was simple: financially incentivize the security research community to find zero-days in common products and responsibly disclose those to the relevant vendor so they can make their products more secure.

The now-famous Pwn2Own competition followed in 2007, offering teams of researchers an opportunity to go head-to-head against each other and the clock to find zero-days in pre-selected product categories.

Trend became the custodian of the ZDI in 2016 after acquiring TippingPoint. Today, the program boasts 450+ dedicated researchers working from 14 global threat centers, and a wider community of over 19,000 vulnerability researchers.

Highlights of the ZDI program include:

• ZDI researchers discovered that a patch for a LNK vulnerability exploited by the infamous Stuxnet worm did not work properly. Their research enabled Microsoft to issue a new patch, five years after the original
• ZDI researchers were awarded $125,000 from Microsoft for discovering a bypass for defensive measures Microsoft had implemented in Internet Explorer. The fee was donated to charity, but the technique was so novel it earned a patent
• ZDI researcher found two zero-days in Apple's QuickTime for Windows software, prompting the tech giant to cease support for the product. ZDI led the charge to urge QuickTime customers to uninstall it
• The ZDI's work has helped to disrupt covert government operations on numerous occasions, including the Black Energy APT which has frequently targeted Ukraine over the years
• A ZDI researcher won a 2023 Pwnie for "most under-hyped research" when he discovered a whole new exploit class: activation context cache poisoning

About Trend Micro
Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Fueled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend Micro's AI-powered cybersecurity platform protects hundreds of thousands of organizations and millions of individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints. As a leader in cloud and enterprise cybersecurity, Trend's platform delivers a powerful range of advanced threat defense techniques optimized for environments like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, and central visibility for better, faster detection and response. With 7,000 employees across 70 countries, Trend Micro enables organizations to simplify and secure their connected world. www.TrendMicro.com.

SOURCE Trend Micro Incorporated