Google awards $36,000 to a 17-year-old from Uruguay for exposing security flaw

**Google** has rewarded a Uruguayan teenager a “bug bounty” of more than $36,000 for disclosing a severe security flaw. [caption id=“attachment_4342935” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters[/caption] Ezequiel Pereira’s sporadic poking around has finally paid off in a big way: Google just awarded the Uruguayan teenager $36,337 for finding a vulnerability that would have allowed him to make changes to internal company systems, CNBC reported on 26 May. “I found something almost immediately that was worth $500 and it just felt so amazing. So I decided to just keep trying ever since then,” Pereira was quoted as saying by CNBC. “It feels really good — I’m glad that I found something that was so important,” he added. Although, Pereira found the bug earlier this year, he only just got permission to write about how he discovered it this week, after Google confirmed that it had fixed the issue, the report said. It marks Pereira’s fifth accepted bug, but it’s by far his most lucrative. Pereira was about a month shy of 17 when he first got paid for exposing a Google security flaw through its bug bounty programme. Pereira got his first computer when he was 10, took an initial programming class when he was 11 and then spent years teaching himself different coding languages and techniques. In 2016, Google flew him to its California headquarters after he won a coding contest.