Pages

Total Pageviews

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

10-year-old wins $10,000 after hacking Instagram

A 10-year-old boy has been rewarded a bug bounty of $10,000 (£6,900) after he discovered a flaw in Instagram's servers that let him delete users' comments from them.

  • 400 million active users
  • More than 40 billion photos shared, and 80 million per day
  • 3.5 billion likes every day
  • Most followed account: Selena Gomez, with over 75 million users
  • Bought by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion

The Finnish boy called Jani, who is not yet old enough to have an Instagram account of his own,  claimed that he was able to delete comments and captions on high profile accounts, including that of Justin Bieber.

Jani didn't actually breach any user information on Instagram's servers, but demonstrated the hack by deleting comment on a test account.

After finding the vulnerability, Jani sent an email to Instagram. Instagram responded that it had fixed the security flaw and rewarded Jani with the bounty

No comments:

Post a Comment