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10-Year-Old Boy From Finland Discovers Instagram Bug, Gets $10,000 Reward From Facebook

By Rahul Srinivas
Published on: 00:05 PST, May 4, 2016

A 10-year-old Finnish child named Jani has become an immediate internet sensation after it was revealed that the boy found a bug in Instagram, the photo sharing platform owned by Facebook. According to Venture Beat, the boy identified only by his last name found a bug in Instagram that let a user delete any comment on the platform. The news was first reported by Finnish newspaper Iltalehti and has since then been confirmed by independent sources.

After finding the bug, he reported it to Facebook, who later acknowledged that the bug did exist. As a reward for his efforts, he was also paid $10,000. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the development and said that the boy did find a bug in Instagram which, mind you, requires a user to be at least 13 before they can sign up for it.

According to reports, after confirming the security flaw on Instagram, Jani reported the bug via email to the Instagram team. In fact, to prove that the bug did exist, he even deleted comments on one of Facebook’s test Instagram accounts. Following the discovery of the bug, the Instagram team at Facebook fixed the bug back in February. The boy was paid $10,000 in March for his efforts.

The engineers at Facebook and Instagram are considered to be among the world’s best. For a 10-year-old to find a bug that was overlooked by all these experts makes Jani’s achievement remarkable. Even more fascinating is the fact that he learned all the basics of internet security, programming, and coding by watching YouTube videos.

In an interview with Finnish-language newspaper Iltalehti, Jan said, “I would have been able to remove anyone, even Justin Bieber.”

When asked about his future plans, Jani told the newspaper he would like to become a security researcher when he grows up. In fact, becoming a security analyst is his “dream job.” There are several others who say Jani has already accomplished his dream at this young age.

“It would be my dream job, Security is very important,” he told the newspaper.

When asked what he did with the $10,000 reward money he received from Facebook, Jani revealed that he used the cash to get himself a new bike. An avid footballer, he also bought himself some football gear and got two computers for his siblings.

Jani was awarded the $10,000 as part of Facebook’s bug bounty program, which encourages talented coders and programmers to find bugs in the Facebook code. There have been several bug bounty recipients in the past, however, 10-year-old Jani is the youngest of them all. The record holder for the previous youngest recipient was 13-years-old, which is a great achievement in itself.

As of February 2016, Facebook says it has awarded more than $4.3 million in rewards to more than 800 independent security researchers who gave more than 2,400 submissions ever since Facebook kickstarted the Facebook bug bounty program back in August 2011. After Instagram was purchased by Facebook, the popular photo-sharing app was added to the program, Facebook confirms.

Facebook is not the only tech company that has a bug bounty program. Other software giants like Google and Microsoft, along with several smaller companies, have their own programs that offer rewards to people who find and fix a security bug in their core before it could be potentially exploited. Offering people rewards is a much cheaper way of fixing the issue rather than losing millions of dollars if the bug is exploited by a hacker, resulting in the loss of millions of dollars.

[Photo by Mark Lennihan/AP Images]

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