10 Year Old Rakes in 10 Grand with Ingenious Instagram Hack

International Business Times

Facebook have an interesting system for figuring out the flaws in its platforms - offer hackers rewards for figuring them out. In the past they've handed out huge sums to otherwise irksome internet fiends devious enough to find the holes in their security. Allegedly thus far the program has awarded over $4.3 million to some 800 hackers across the world, but I'll bet they weren't ready for this.

In February, one such person managed to reveal that it was possible to delete any comment on Instagram, with a bit of poking around. Having patched this rather unbecoming bug, Facebook then handed off $10,000 to the hacker in question, Helsinki resident 'Jani'. As it turns out though, there was something about him that Zuckerberg and company probably weren't aware of at the time - he's 10 years old.

His age was revealed in an interview with Finnish site Iltalehti, during which he said that once he found the flaw, he could have deleted anyone's comments, "even Justin Bieber". He verified this by deleting a comment that Facebook had put on a test account.

It's not the first time a minor has earned a bug bounty. According to Facebook, the youngest previous winner was 13, buteven compared to that, 10 is unprecedented. Jani claims that he learned a great deal of his hacking skills from watching YouTube videos, and if he's already at this level now, think where he might be in 10 or 20 years. It just goes to show how the environment we live in now can be exploited at an early age.