When it comes to social media, thousands of people use Instagram is used all over by hundreds who share pictures and videos with anyone from their immediate family to their fans from around the world. This year a 10-year-old from Helsinki, Jani, managed to find a potentially devastating bug that has since netted him the $10,000 given by Facebook for security flaws.
Jani received the bounty after discovering a flaw within Instagram that allowed him to delete any written content, to which he explained that he could have “been able to eliminate anyone, even Justin Bieber”.
Jani is looking to become a security expert and in light of his discovery emailed Facebook, who had him test out his security exploit on a dummy account’s test message. The issue was then fixed back in February, with the company confirming the fix and giving the 10-year-old the reward in March. What does a 10-year-old spend all that money on you may ask? Jani plans to buy everything from new football gear and a new bike to some new computers for his brothers, a rather admirable spending spree.
With over $4.3 million provided to over 800 researchers since its launch, the bug bounty scheme is just another example of how the community can help protect people and their software from malicious code and genuine coding error.
