Wednesday, May 4, 2016

10 year old boy receives $10,000 reward for finding Instagram bug



Instagram, which was bought by Facebook in 2012 for $1bn, is part of the Facebook “bug bounty” program, created in 2011, under which people who spot chinks in Facebook’s digital armour are given a reward.

The program has paid upwards of $4.3m to more than 800 people who have spotted bugs in the social network’s programming, a spokesperson for Instagram said.

A 10-year-old found a bug in Instagram, which requires you to be at least 13 before even signing up, that let him delete any comment on the social network. He reported his discovery to Facebook, and got paid $10,000, according to Finnish newspaper Iltalehti. We contacted Facebook, and a spokesperson confirmed the notable accomplishment.

He has a twin brother, and the two have been learning together. He became interested in information security – which he said would be his “dream job” – and honed his craft using instructional videos on YouTube.

Jani, a Finnish boy from Helsinki, discovered the security flaw in Instagram on his own. He reported the bug by email, offered proof by deleting a message on one of Facebook’s test Instagram accounts, and it was fixed in February. Facebook paid him the bug bounty in March.

Jani learned the basics of his security skills on YouTube. “I would have been able to remove anyone, even Justin Bieber,” he told Iltalehti.

Jani is the youngest person to be paid through Facebook’s bug bounty program, to date. While this is an impressive achievement, it’s worth noting that it’s not exactly new. Facebook gets reports from teenagers from time to time, and notes that it is not uncommon across the industry. The last youngest person to be paid a Facebook bug bounty was 13.


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