A 10-year-old boy discovers a security flaw on Instagram

A few weeks ago a young man from India discovered a security flaw in the Facebook website that allowed, using the beta version, to carry out brute force attacks up to get into the account we want. This young man brought this information to the attention of the company and was awarded $ 15.000.

Now it is the turn of Instagram, the other social network of Facebook. Fino, a young man of only 10 years old and who is not even the minimum age to be able to access either of the two social networks, has discovered one of the most important security holes of the company, a hole that allowed any user to be removed.

Young Finn, living in Helsinki, apparently discovered that he could tampering with the code on Instagram's servers to trick the system and force it to remove any user. This problem was detected by Finn in February and a few days later, once the problem had been confirmed and fixed, he received the usual compensation, set at $ 10.000. Facebook is one of the companies that invests the most money each year in this reward system for reporting bugs on its platforms, which may suggest that the security of its system can be skipped by anyone with not very great knowledge.

So far and as the company has announced, Mark Zuckerberg's company has paid more than four million dollars in this type of bonuses, which have been distributed among more than 800 people who have contributed with their research to make the social network and all its services safer. Last year alone, it paid $ 936.000 to 210 security breach investigators who reported a problem related to one of its platforms.