10 Year Old Hacks Instagram, Rewarded By Mark Zuckerberg | TechTree.com

10 Year Old Hacks Instagram, Rewarded By Mark Zuckerberg

A PTI report featured the brilliance of a 10 year old Finnish boy who successfully hacked Instagram.

 

Jani a  10 year old boy from Finland received a handsome USD 10,000 by hacking into the popular photo sharing site Instagram which is owned by Facebook. With this feat Jani is now the youngest hacker to have been recognised and rewarded by Facebook.  The little wizard dreams of a career in internet security.

Despite the fact that he is too young to register an account on Instagram or Facebook, Jani, the Helsinki-based boy genius discovered that he could infiltrate Instagram and demonstrate the hack without even logging into an account.

According to Finnish publication Iltalehti, Jani (whose last name has not been released) discovered that he could alter code on Instagram’s servers to force delete users’ comments and captions. “I would have been able to eliminate anyone, even Justin Bieber,” Jani told the publication.

A Facebook spokesperson told Forbes that the bug was fixed in late February and awarded Jani USD 10,000 in March.
According to the spokesperson, the loophole was found in a private application programming interface that was not checking whether the person deleting the comment was the same user who posted it.The USD 10,000 prize is a part of Facebook’s Bug Bounty programme that offers rewards to White Hat hackers and researchers who find bugs or glitches in their digital
infrastructure, including Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

The programme has reportedly received over 2,400 valid submissions since its launch five years ago and has awarded more than USD 4.3 million to over 800 researchers.


TAGS: Instagram, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg

 
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