Mumbai: The practice of bug hunting has picked up significant pace over the years and numerous security enthusiasts—both young and old—have assisted large-scale businesses to identify their security loopholes.
Recently, a 10-year old youth has managed to discover a major flaw on Instagram, which fetched him Rs 6,65604.50 ($10,000) from Facebook.
According to a report on Mashable, Jani (last name withheld by parents) managed to delve into Instagram’s servers and delete users posts easily.
As mentioned earlier, Jani was rewarded the amount under Facebook’s bug bounty programme, which gives an opportunity to individuals to find out major or minor flaws within Facebook’s digital infrastructure and this includes Instagram as well.
Talking to Finnish website Iltalehti, the boy said that he could easily delete comments on the picture-sharing social platform, which he demonstrated to Instagram by removing a comment on a test account.
Jani also said humorously that he could even delete Justin Bieber’s comments using the flaw he found. Jani’s father pointed out that he along with his twin brother have previously uncovered security flaws in the past but this was the first instance where a cash reward was received.
The emergence of bug hunting can primarily be credited to tech companies such as Facebook and Google who have encouraged individuals from around the globe to identify problems for a one-time bounty.
In 2015, Facebook's team classified 102 bug bounty submissions as high impact, an increase of 38 per cent over the previous year.
It received 13,233 total submissions from 5,543 researchers in 127 countries and paid USD 936,000 to 210 researchers, who submitted a total of 526 valid reports. The average payout was USD 1,780. India, Egypt, and Trinidad and Tobago received the highest number of payouts.
