A Finnish 10-year old has claimed the title of being the youngest recipient of the Facebook Bounty Program by pointing out a flaw in the Instagram.
The genius child, christened Jani, wowed the social media giant by revealing a vulnerability in the Facebook-owned Instagram, which allowed him to remove the written content on photo sharing platform. Facebook rewarded the child with $10,000 for his discovery.
The most incredible aspect of his discovery was that the bug in Instagram allowed him to tamper with the code on the servers of the photo sharing app without even having to log in. The underlying flaw which allowed him to delete the comments originated in the app programming interface that did not accurately verify the ID of the person deleting the comment. Jani said that the security flaw even allowed him to delete Justin Beiber’s comment if he felt like it.
The self-trained Finnish youth reported his discovery to Facebook, which then verified the boy’s claims by removing a comment posted by the social media giant on a test account. The team fixed the bug in February. Jani will be spending the reward money on football, a new bicycle and latest computers for his twin and himself.
A latest Facebook report states that more than 800 White Hat hackers, researchers and amateurs have claimed about $4.3 million by unearthing security flaws in the code. The amount of the reward is determined on the basis of the security risk associated with the flaw, rather than its complexity.