As portion of a Facebook-financed effort, a team of US researchers has developed a fresh cyber security program that found 11 formerly unknown Internet browser security defects.

The 11 susceptibility identified by the researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology’s school of computing repaired and have been verified by the browser manufacturers.

The research investigated susceptibility in C programmes (including Chrome and Firefox) that result from “poor cast” or “kind confusion”.

The researchers developed a brand new, proprietary detection program called Caver – a runtime detection tool – to find them.

“It’s really time for the Internet community to begin addressing the more challenging, deeper security issues,” said Lee, professor and an advisor to the team in a statement.

“Our work examined the considerably more difficult and deeper bugs in particular ‘use-after-free’ and ‘poor cast’ – as well as our programs found serious security bugs in widely used applications. We’re glad to Facebook for this particular acknowledgement,” he added.

Facebook’s “Internet Defense Prize” award recognises exceptional-quality research that joins a working model with substantial contributions to the security of the Internet especially in the areas of protection and defence.

The award is intended to recognise the direction of the research and to inspire researchers to concentrate on high-impact regions.

“Designing defensive security technology hasn’t been more significant, and that is the reason why we’re once again offering the Internet Defense Prize to spark high quality research in this region,” said Ioannis Papagiannis, security engineering supervisor at Facebook.