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Facebook pays $10,000 to 10-year-old Instagram hacker
A photo illustration shows the applications Facebook and Instagram on the screen of an iPhone in Zagreb April 9, 2012.
Reuters/Antonio Bronic
Social media giant Facebook (FB.O) has paid a $10,000 reward to a 10-year-old Finnish boy for finding a glitch in its picture sharing app Instagram.
Jani, whose last name was not released for privacy reasons, is the youngest ever recipient of Facebook's "bug bounty", paid to users who find bugs or weaknesses in its platforms.
"I wanted to see if Instagram's comment field could stand malicious code. Turns out it couldn't," Jani told Finland's Iltalehti newspaper.
Facebook said the glitch was fixed in February and the reward was paid in March.
Jani, who is still too young to have a Facebook or Instagram account of his own, said he learned coding from Youtube videos and found a way to delete user comments from Instagram accounts.
"I could have deleted anyone's comments from there. Even Justin Bieber's," he told Iltalehti.
He said he was thinking about a career in data security, but for now his plans include buying a new bike and a football with his reward money.
(Reporting by Tuomas Forsell; Editing by Mark Potter)
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