Facebook has been paying specialists in Russia and Brazil to hack into the social networking website.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Facebook had already paid out $1.5 million to security researchers last year as part of its Big Bounty program. The researchers have been paid on an average of $4,000 each for successful attempts.
Facebook is awarding its researchers with the moolah if vulnerability is found. This information is then used by Facebook to later fortify the website and prevent future hacking.
Russians have already submitted around 38 bugs, while Brazilians have shown up with 53 bugs. Those in US targeted almost 92 bugs and researchers in India contributed to the largest amount of almost 136 bugs.
Collin Greene, a security engineer at Facebook, wrote in a blog post that the company received nearly 15,000 submissions last year, more than triple the number in 2012. Just 687 of those were deemed as valid, and of those, 6 per cent were classified as high severity.
"The volume of high-severity issues is down, and we're hearing from researchers that it's tougher to find good bugs," Greene wrote. "To encourage the best research in the most valuable areas, we're going to continue increasing our reward amounts for high-priority issues," he added.
