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10-year-old wins US$10,000 for hacking Instagram

By James Lu - on 4 May 2016, 9:55am

10-year-old wins US$10,000 for hacking Instagram

A 10-year-old Finnish boy named Jani has scored himself US$10,000 for discovering a way to delete other users' comments from Instagram's servers. Jani claimed the security flaw he discovered could even allow him to delete Justin Bieber's Instagram comments and captions.

Jani showed off his hack to the Instagram team by deleting a comment they posted on a test account. Jani's father told Finnish news site Iltalehti, that Jani and his twin brother are fairly prolific at poking holes in seemingly secure websites, but the Instagram hack was their biggest to date.

The US$10,000 prize was part of Facebook's Bug Bounty program, which offers rewards to White Hat hackers and other researchers who find bugs or security flaws in their code. Facebook reportedly paid out US$936,000 to 210 different researchers in 2015, out of a grand total of 13,000 submissions.

Source: Iltalehti via Mashable

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