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Instagram hacked by 10-year-old, paid $10k

Manny Pham
May 4, 2016

A Finish boy named Jani was awarded $10,000 (£7,000) after he discovered a security flaw in popular social media website Instagram. 

Legally he’s not even allowed to have an Instagram account, yet the young Helsinki based Jani found a flaw in Instagram that could have been used for nefarious purposes. Speaking to Iltalehti the boy claims he could eliminate any comments he wanted, even from popular Instagram pages like Canadian pop star Justin Bieber.

After making the discovery Jani emailed Facebook, Instagram’s parent company. Facebook engineers set up a test account for Jani to prove his bug, which he did and was then rewarded the $10,000 (£7,000).

The money was rewarded as part of Facebook’s bug bounty programme which is known to offer cash rewards to those who find bugs and flaws in Facebook, Instagram, Oculus and a host of other websites. Strangely finding a bug in WhatsApp does not qualify for a reward…

Facebook’s Bug Bounty programme has paid over $2 million since it started in 2011. In 2013 alone the scheme paid $1.5 million to bug hunters. The incetive was set up to stop those who find exploits from selling the information to cyber criminals.

Expert hacker Steve Lord told us: “it’s great to see Instagram being such a good sport about this. They could’ve argued that he didn’t qualify as he’s too young, but it’s things like bug bounties that encourage people to stay on the right track.”

Jani is not Finish-ed

Despite being 10-years-old Jan’s father says he and his twin brother have been coding for several years and are very enthusiastic particularly with game coding. Jani had given a presentation on data security to his own class. A career in data security would be Jani’s “dream job,” anyone out there want to offer him an apprenticeship?

Jani plans on buying a new bike and and new computers for himself and his brother.

For more news, visit What Mobile’s dedicated news page.

Via Mashable

Source: Iltalehti

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