10-year old who found a flaw in Instagram gets $10,000 from Facebook

Facebook is known to hand out bug bounty rewards to users who find out flaws and alert the social media giant about it. But this time around, a 10-year old who is not even on Facebook, found a major flaw in Facebook owned Instagram, that earned him $10,000 from the social media site. The flaw that Jani discovered, let him get into Instagram servers and delete text posted by Instagram users says Mashable. This made him eligible to win the bug bounty program. The 10-year old told Finnish news site (which broke the story) that he could delete any text posted by any user. The flaw was demonstrated after Jani created a test account. He went on to claim that he could even delete comments posted by celebrities by exploiting this flaw. According to Jani’s father, Jani and his twin brother have found security bugs in a lot of programs and sites, but none of them were significant enough to be rewarded to handsomely. Couple of months ago, Facebook had rewarded 22-year old Anand Prakash , a Bengaluru-based security expert, a reward of $15,000 after he discovered and alerted Facebook about a flaw that could grant access to messages, credit/debit cards tied to the account and personal photos and other personal information. Facebook has paid out a total of $936,000 to 210 researchers in 2015 according to Mashable.