Instagram Ten-year-old receives $10,000 reward for finding Instagram bug A Finnish boy is the youngest person to get payout for finding bug that allowed comments to be deleted – and says he’ll use the money to buy a football and bike 
 
 Instagram is part of Facebook’s ‘bug bounty’ program, in which people who spot bugs given $10,000. Photograph: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg didn’t even begin to learn programming until he got a tutor at 11 years old – so he may have met his match in a 10-year-old Finnish schoolboy who has received a $10,000 bounty from Facebook after finding a vulnerability in Instagram’s code. 
 
 Instagram, which was bought by Facebook in 2012 for $1bn, is part of the Facebook “bug bounty” program, created in 2011, under which people who spot chinks in Facebook’s digital armour are given a reward. 
 
 The program has paid upwards of $4.3m to more than 800 people who have spotted bugs in the social network’s programming, a spokesperson for Instagram said. 
 
 While reports from teenagers are not uncommon, at 10, the Finn is the youngest person ever to receive the bounty. 
 
 The bug allowed other people’s comments to be deleted, though not in bulk, and was reported and fixed in February. The reward was paid out in March. 
 
 The 10-year-old has been interested in coding and video games for two years, according to the Helsinki-based newspaper Iltalehti, which first reported the story. He has a twin brother, and the two have been learning together. He became interested in information security – which he said would be his “dream job” – and honed his craft using instructional videos on YouTube. 
 
 “I tested whether the comments section of Instagram can handle harmful code. Turns out it can’t. I noticed that I can delete other people’s comments from there,” the young hacker told Iltalehti. “I could have deleted anyone’s – like Justin Bieber’s for example – comments.” 
 
 His classmates were “surprised and astonished” by the reward, according to Iltalehi, and his father, Marko, told the paper that it had come as “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],” he added. 
 
 And what does a 10-year-old do with $10,000? He reportedly plans to buy a football and a new bicycle. 

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 Are you smarter than a 10-year-old? Probably not the one who just made a cool $10,000 from Facebook for showing you could hack into Instagram and delete comments made by users. 
 
 Speaking to local publication Iltalehti, Jani (whose last name hasn’t been released) said (in Finnish): “I would have been able to eliminate anyone, even Justin Bieber.” 
 
 The Finnish kid has just become the youngest ever recipient of cash from Facebook for hacking its products. 
 
 The previous record was set by a 13-year-old back in 2013, meaning this latest young hacker is the first person to crack a Facebook product that they aren’t technically even able to use, given that it’s supposed to be restricted to under-13s. 
 
 While clearly poking around where he shouldn’t have been, Jani found he could alter code on Instagram’s servers and force-delete users’ posts. This was confirmed by Facebook using a test account and patched in February, the company told Forbes. 
 
 Since it launched five years ago, Facebook says the program has had more than 2,400 valid submissions and awarded upwards of $4.3 million to over 800 researchers. 
 
 The average payout last year was only $1,780, so the payment to Jani is more than just pocket change from Facebook and indicates just how serious the hack could have been if it wasn’t identified to the company. 
 
 10-Year-Old Hacks Instagram; Wins $10K From Facebook on Forbes 
 
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– Next time the FBI needs somebody to break into an iPhone, there's a 10-year-old whiz kid in Finland who might be able to help them out. Jani, a schoolboy who started coding when he was 8, has been awarded $10,000 under Facebook's "bug bounty" scheme after spotting a security hole in Instagram coding that would allow users to delete other people's comments, the Guardian reports. "I tested whether the comments section of Instagram can handle harmful code. Turns out it can't. I noticed that I can delete other people's comments from there," Jani tells Finnish newspaper Iltalehti. "I could have deleted anyone's—like Justin Bieber's, for example—comments." He reported the bug in February and it was fixed in March. Jani is the youngest person ever to be awarded cash under Facebook's bug-finding program, which has paid $4.3 million to more than 800 people since it was launched in 2011, TNW notes. The previous record-holder was 13. The schoolboy, whose twin brother is also learning how to find security holes, says he taught himself with the help of YouTube videos and his "dream job" would be working in information security. For now, he plans to spend the reward money on a soccer ball and a new bike. (Last fall, a hacker won a $1 million bounty for finding a security hole in Apple's iOS 9.)