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Facebook gave away a reward of $10,000 to a 10-year old boy for finding a bug in the company owned photo-sharing platform, Instagram. The social media giant bought Instagram in 2012, which is currently used by millions of people around the world.

Instagram enables people to post and share their photos with other users and also lets users comment on the photos. The 10-year-old hacker is said to have spotted a flaw in the platform which allowed him to delete other people's comments. As a matter of fact, the Finnish boy is not eligible to have an own account in the site as per Instagram's minimum age policy, according to CNN.

The boy nicknamed as "Jani" is said to have reported the Finnish newspaper, Iltalehti that with the bug he detected in Instagram he could have deleted even Justin Bieber's comments. He is said to have reported the security flaw in the platform through an email with a proof by deleting comments on one of the Facebook test Instagram account, reported The Economic Times.

The bug which was reported by the boy was said to have been fixed by the company in February. However, Facebook rewarded him with $10,000 as per "bug bounty program" of the platform, which has been rewarding hackers that report security flaws in the sites. According to the report, the boy would like to spend the money for buying a soccer ball and a bike. The "bug bounty program" was started by Facebook in 2011 and has rewarded around $4.3 Million for about 800 users worldwide.

"We recognise and reward security researchers who help us to keep people safe by reporting vulnerabilities in our services. Monetary bounties for such reports are entirely at Facebook's discretion, based on risk, impact and other factors. Submit your report via our "Report a Security Vulnerability" form (one issue per report) and respond to the report with any updates," notes Facebook.

Bug bounty programme scope

To qualify for a bounty, report a security bug in Facebook or one of the following qualifying products or acquisitions:

Instagram

Internet.org/Free Basics

Moves

Oculus

Onavo

Open-source projects by Facebook/Parse (e.g. osquery)

Parse