Tech

Facebook gives 10-year-old $10K for hacking into Instagram

A child three years too young to use Instagram has been richly rewarded after spotting a bug in the app.

Jani, 10, hacked into the Facebook-owned app and found that he could delete any comment on the social media tool.

The Finn has become the youngest recipient of Facebook’s “bug bounty,” receiving $10,000 for his work.

The computer whiz told Finnish publication Iltalehti: “I would have been able to eliminate anyone, even Justin Bieber.”

In the future, the youngster wants to forge a career in information security.

He plans to buy a football and a new bicycle with his reward.

Facebook confirmed to Forbes that Jani proved the bug by deleting a comment that the tech company posted on a test account.

The fault was fixed in February and Jani got his award in March.

Rules laid out by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg state that Instagram users have to be at least 13 years old.

According to the Finnish paper, his school friends were “surprised and astonished.”

His father, Marko, said it was “a total surprise that [my son] has gone this far with it.

“For me all this is social media gibberish — [it’s all] Greek [to me].”

Created in 2011, the bug bounty program rewards hackers for picking up on errors in Facebook’s systems.

Fellow tech giants Google and Microsoft also run similar programs.

Facebook has shelled out $4.3 million to reward more than 800 researchers as part of the bug bounty program.

In 2015, $936,000 was paid to 210 researchers.

But not all bug spotters manage to clinch their reward.

In December 2015, Wes Wineberg found a bug that gave him access to a huge amount of internal Instagram data.

But Facebook refused to pay Wineberg, saying the researcher had gone too far.