The boy hacked Instagram and earned $ 10,000

A schoolboy from Finland has become the youngest winner of the Bug Bounty award in the entire history of Facebook, perhaps in general in the history of IT. A ten-year-old boy named Yani (parents hide his surname) found a way to remove arbitrary comments on Instagram messages, the Finnish newspaper Iltalehti reports .

“I checked whether it is possible to post malicious code in the comments. It turned out impossible. But I noticed that I can remove other people's comments from there, ”said a third-grader. In more detail about the method of hacking, it does not spread, although the hole is already closed and it would be possible to publish the SQL injection code, if that is it.
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Having written about the bug in Facebook, Yani (more precisely, his parents) deservedly received a black hacker VISA White Hat card with ten thousand dollars.

Receiving a large sum of money was extremely surprised by classmates and father: “It turned out to be a complete surprise for me, that my son would go so far with this [with his hacker hobby],” he said.

Facebook launched the Bug Bounty program in the summer of 2011. Since then, hundreds of security professionals and users who have caught the fortune have received mail cards with credited rewards, usually between $ 500 and $ 10,000. The total amount of remuneration exceeds one million dollars a year .

There are really a lot of vulnerabilities in Facebook, Instagram and other applications: thousands of bugs are found every year, of which several dozens are regarded as high-risk vulnerabilities and are paid at the maximum rate.

At first, Facebook only paid for the found vulnerabilities on the website and in the mobile application, in 2013 it distributed the program to Instagram, Parse, Atlas and Onavo, in 2014 - to Oculus Rift virtual reality glasses and the Moves application.

Interestingly, Mark Zuckerberg himself began to learn programming only at the age of 11, when he was hired as a tutor. But the 10-year-old Finnish schoolboy found a bug without any tutors. In an interview for the newspaper, he said that in the future he wanted to work in the field of information security, and now he is exploring ways of hacking from videos on Youtube.

The boy is going to buy a football and a bicycle with the money he earned.