14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook awarded a prize of $10,000 (€9,000) to a ten-year-old Finish boy named Jani after he discovered a security bug on Instagram that allowed him to delete any content he wanted.
Jani reported the issue to Facebook at the end of February and received his bounty in March. To demonstrate his bug, Jani deleted a message on one of Facebook's test Instagram accounts.
After receiving his reward, Jani is now Facebook's youngest security researcher who received a bug bounty. The previous record was 13.
According to Finish newspaper Iltalehti, Jani learned the basics of coding and IT security from YouTube videos. Jani told the publication he planned to become a security researcher and that he would use the reward to buy a new bike, football gear, and new computers for his two brothers.
At the end of March, Facebook fixed another Instagram bug that allowed attackers to gain control of any account. At the end of February, Facebook fixed one more issue in Instagram that enabled users to see someone else's notifications.
The biggest Instagram hack took place last December, when a security researcher took control of the Instagram backend. The case didn't end well for the researcher, who didn't receive any monetary reward because Facebook considered he went too far with his "hacking" when trying to prove the danger of the bug he discovered.