10-year-old boy awarded $10,000 for discovering security fault in Instagram

A 10-year-old — who is not even old enough to sign up on Facebook — has received 10,000 dollars from Instagram after he impressed Mark Zuckerberg by hacking Instagram, the photo-sharing application owned by Facebook.

The young wunderkind, whose name was given as Jani, discovered he could alter code on Instagram servers to force delete users’ words. That is, he could delete other people’s comments when he inputted malicious code into the comment field of the application.

“I would have been able to eliminate anyone, even Justin Bieber,” he told a newspaper. Jani informed Instagram about the technical fault by email, after a few days, Instagram replied to him
that the flaw was fixed, and as a reward, he received 10,000 dollars from Instagram. Facebook told FORBES that Jani even verified his report by deleting a comment the company posted on a test account.

The boy said he had been enthusiastic about coding games for years. He had been building up his skills on his own with his twin brother. Jani’s father said that he was very surprised that his son had learned so much about coding and data security. Meanwhile the boy said he dreamed of becoming an information security expert in the future.

“It would be my dream job; security is really important,’’ Jani said.

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