Arul Kumar,Salem,Tamil Nadu,India gets a reward of Rs. 8 lakh from Facebook

The discovery of a bug on a popular social networking site has won a 21-year-old engineering graduate a reward of Rs. 8 lakh.

The malfunction reportedly enabled users on Facebook to remove pictures from other accounts without the knowledge or approval of the owner.

For his discovery,Arul Kumar was awarded with Rs. 8,12,500($12,500) as part of Facebook’s bug bounty programme through which it incentivises those who find flaws on the networking site.

Arul Kumar, who hails from Salem, graduated from Hindustan Institute of Technology in Coimbatore in June 2013 and is now in Chennai on the lookout for a job

The Problem

“I have always been interested in the security of frequently-used websites such as Google and Facebook. There has to be a bug somewhere, and I keep testing every feature of these sites,” said Arul.

It was during one such testing exercise that he wondered if photos uploaded on Facebook by a user could be removed by others. Users are aware of two ways to remove a picture from the site — either the account owner removes it or somebody else who has a problem with it uses the dashboard to request the Facebook team to remove it, said Arul.

“But Facebook also has an option that asks the user who uploaded the picture to remove it. When I tested the feature, it turned out the request to remove the picture was sent to the person who wanted it removed, and not to the one who uploaded it — that was the bug,” he said. 

It took a night for Arul to verify the error, after which he sent a detailed report to Facebook. “But they rejected my claim saying they could not detect the bug. It was only when I sent them a video of the malfunction that they believed such a bug existed.”