Indian Hacker is Awarded by Facebook

A young hacker from Kollam, India has received Rs. 17 lakhs bounty after finding a vulnerability in Facebook code. And the hacker is Arun S. Kumar, a 20-year-old computer engineering student at the MES Institute of Technology and Management in Chathannoor. He exposed a critical vulnerability in Facebook Business Manager which would allow a hacker to take control over the Facebook page in less than 10 seconds.

After finding the vulnerability, he said- "Since the hacker would be able to manipulate the page of any Facebook user, the damage it would bring is beyond imagination.”

Facebook began the bug bounty program in 2011, under which people who notify flaws on its website are given a reward. He detected the bug on August 29 and reported it to the Facebook security team. One of them wrote back to him the very next day saying how his discovery helped them to prevent a massive security breach. The team fixed the bug by September 6 and after three days Arun got a mail from them informing him of their decision to reward him.

Facebook had invited him along with three other hackers from different countries for a meeting with its security members at Las Vegas. He was also awarded the tenth place in the Facebook's hall of fame of the white hat hackers. He is the only Indian to be honored in the website’s hall of fame.

The young hacker has a history of bug hunting. Before this, he had spotted many bugs in Google and Facebook itself in the past. The young techie has received about Rs. 50 lakhs in payouts for hunting down bugs in the past three years.